Explore the vast range of titles available.

In recent years, researchers and practitioners have increasingly paid attention to food waste, which is seen as highly unethical given its negative environmental and societal implications. Waste recovery is dependent on the creation of connections along the supply chain, so that actors with goods at risk of becoming waste can transfer them to those who may be able to use them as inputs or for their own consumption. Such waste recovery is, however, often hampered by what we call 'circularity holes', i.e., missing linkages between waste generators and potential receivers. A new type of actor, the digital platform organization, has recently taken on a brokerage function to bridge circularity holes, particularly in the food supply chain. Yet, extant literature has overlooked this novel type of brokerage that exploits digital technology for the transfer and recovery of discarded resources between supply chain actors. Our study investigates this actor, conceptualized as a 'circularity broker', and thus unites network research and circular supply chain research. Focusing on the food supply chain, we adopt an interpretive inductive theory-building approach to uncover how platform organizations foster the recovery of waste by bridging circularity holes. We identify and explicate six brokerage roles, i.e., connecting, informing, protecting, mobilizing, integrating and measuring, and discuss them in relation to extant literature, highlighting novelties compared to earlier studies. The final section reflects on contributions, implications, limitations and areas for further research.

This article ties in directly with recently intensified interest in business models in international business (IB), using the energy transition as empirical context to explore their relevance in firm internationalization. The global energy transition presents a challenge for almost all industries, but some face specific difficulties particularly important from an IB perspective. We study a set of European firms that used to operate in a highly regulated context with (partial) state ownership, until government-directed market liberalization started to allow further competition and internationalization. Existing firms were prompted to adapt their business models to these changes, with new ventures entering the market to reap opportunities with novel energy-related technologies and business models. Linking insights from strategic management to the IB literature, we conceptualize business model-related specific advantages (BMSAs), and explore the role of BMSAs in the internationalization of the firms in our sample. We also uncover barriers to BMSA recombination in (potential) host countries, consider BMSA location-boundedness, and discuss implications for firms’ international expansion by presenting a new framework. Consequences for the energy transition and the actors already involved and (in)directly confronted with it are explicated, while outlining promising areas for further research, building on the insights and limitations of our study.

The growing interest in global value chains (GVCs) has been paired with a greater appreciation of the need for better measurement methods, as reflected by recent initiatives from academia and leading international organizations. This research note focuses on one method to measure GVCs that has been recommended in recent scholarly work, namely input–output models, but goes beyond the industry level of analysis by introducing intra-industry firm heterogeneity. Our illustrative application to multinational enterprises (MNEs) versus domestic firms’ participation in GVCs enhances our understanding of their specific role in GVCs and how such engagement varies across countries and industries. While showing that MNEs’ contribution to value-added exports is considerably smaller than what is suggested by traditional trade statistics, our findings also, interestingly, document that the higher import content of exports of MNEs can go hand in hand with the creation of local backward linkages as a function of their much higher specialization in only parts of the production process vis-à-vis domestic firms. By answering relevant questions on MNEs’ engagement in GVCs that have hitherto been impossible to address comprehensibly and in a cross-country comparative setting, this application illustrates how the methodology has great potential for international business research.

Whereas IB has extensively studied MNEs’ generic (positive) impact on host economies, but rarely on employee wages, economics research has only shown an overall MNE wage premium. We ‘unravel’ this premium, considering multiple levels of analysis and accounting for host-country contextual contingencies, to unveil MNEs different (positive or negative) distributional effects. Using unique micro-level data from over 40,000 employees in 13 countries, we examine MNEs’ distributional effects for employees’ gender, experience, and immigrant status; the influence of host-country property rights protection and labor regulation; and interplays with region and industry effects. MNEs’distributional effects show marked differences that largely depend on the host-country context, and that are positive for experienced and foreignborn employees in developed countries but negative for females working in developing countries. Whereas in developed countries the gender wage gap is smaller in MNEs than in domestic firms as hypothesized, we find evidence of a larger wage gap in developing countries. The analysis also reveals that the higher host-countries’ level of property rights protection, the lower the MNE wage premium. Our study points at the need to reassess statements about the generic positive impact of MNEs in host countries, particularly in developing countries, and discusses (further) research implications.

This article examines the role of multinationals and international business in poverty alleviation, based on an analysis of articles in the top journals in business, economics, and policy. We develop a conceptual cross-disciplinary framework that maps and disentangles the impact of different types of international business activities on five dimensions of poverty, moderated by country and industry effects. While our study suggests that the impact of all the types of business activities on poverty is still unclear overall, we contribute to research and policy debates by identifying key insights from and main gaps in this cross-disciplinary stream of literature. A distinction is made between firm effects as part of both ‘mainstream’ and ‘responsible’ globalization, and firm-specific activities with and without the explicit goal of poverty alleviation, considering investment and trade. We propose areas for further research based on the framework, including the importance of interaction effects and contextual factors.

In this article we explore how multinational corporations (MNCs) adopt assurance practices to develop and sustain organizational accountability for sustainability. Using a panel of Fortune Global 250 firms over a period of 10 years, we document the diffusion patterns of third-party assurance of sustainability reports. We specifically investigate how evolving auditing practices, namely diversity of assurance standards and type of assurance providers, shape the quality of sustainability assurance statements. The results illustrate great variability in the adoption of assurance practices in the formative stages of this novel market. Our descriptive analysis indicates the relevance of external institutional pressure as well as internal resources and capabilities as underlying factors driving the adoption of assurance. Our evidence also suggests that several MNCs project a decoupled or symbolic image of accountability through assurance, thereby undermining the credibility of these verification practices. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on international accountability standards and emphasizes the need to enhance theory-based, cross-disciplinary knowledge related to auditing and accountability processes for sustainability.

Recent years have seen growing interest in a leading role for cities in addressing major environmental sustainability challenges including cleaner air and water. While geographers have long studied urban governance responses, international business (IB) scholars have embraced city-level analyses only in the past decade, primarily to examine multinationals’ location strategies. Thus far, IB has not studied cities’ environmental sustainability in relation to foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Our paper does so by analyzing whether it ‘pays’ to be green for cities in attracting FDI inflows, using a comprehensive sample of Chinese cities of different sizes over a 7-year period comprising 918 city-year observations. A fixed-effects panel data estimation shows that it indeed pays for cities to be green, specifically considering air quality and waste water treatment, two key locational factors exposing different mechanisms. Implications for green urban and business policies and for IB research are discussed.

Despite a strong plea for integrating sustainability goals into traditional corporate bonus schemes, a comprehensive implementation of these systems has been lacking until recently. This article explores four illustrative cases from the Netherlands, where several multinationals started to pioneer with sustainable bonuses in the past few years. The article examines the setups and the different elements of bonus programmes used, in terms of performance criteria (focusing in particular on external vs. internal benchmarking), their link to specific stakeholders, type and size of bonuses, target levels and transparency. While sustainable bonuses signal corporate awareness of responsibility vis-à-vis society and stakeholders, credibility varies considerably depending on these elements. Our case evidence sheds some light on the extent to which sustainable bonuses may be a credible sign of corporate responsibility or rather just another perverse mechanism meant to keep up bonus levels (window dressing). A definite assessment is hampered by the emergent state and lack of full transparency—while 'justified' by companies for competitive reasons, this raises questions. Insights are offered to appraise current and future systems and provide directions for further research.

This paper explores how climate change affects multinational enterprises (MNEs), focusing on the challenges they face in overcoming liabilities and filling institutional voids related to the issue. Climate change is characterized by institutional failures, because there is neither an enforceable global agreement nor a market morality. Climate change is also a distinctive international business issue, as its institutional failures materialize differently in different countries. As governments are still highly involved, MNEs need to consider carefully their strategies to cope with non-market forces, including their embeddedness in multiple institutional settings. Using some illustrative examples of MNE responses to climate-related components in stimulus packages, we explore MNEs' balancing act concerning their institutional embeddedness (or lack thereof) in home, host and supranational contexts as input for further research on the dynamics of MNE activities in relation to climate change.

This paper explores the role of ideology in attempts to influence public policy and in business representation in the EU–China solar panel anti-dumping dispute. It exposes the dynamics of international activity by emerging-economy multinationals, in this case from China, and their interactions in a developed-country context (the EU). Theoretically, the study also sheds light on the recent notion of 'liability of origin', in addition to the traditional concept of 'liability of foreignness' explored in international business research, in relation to firms' market and political strategies and their institutional embeddedness in home and host countries. Through a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary materials and interview data with key protagonists, we provide a detailed evolution of the case, the key actors involved and their positions, arguments and strategies. This illustrates the complexities involved in the interaction between markets and ideologies in the midst of debates regarding different forms of subsidy regimes for renewable energy, free trade versus protectionist tendencies by governments, and the economic and sustainability objectives of firms and societies. The case shows how relative newcomers to the EU market responded to overcome a direct threat to their business and became, with support from their home government, active participants in the public debate through interactions with local commercial partners and non-governmental organisations. Firms adopted relatively sophisticated strategies to reduce their liabilities vis-à-vis host-country institutions and local stakeholders, including collective action, to increase their legitimacy and reputation, and counter ideologically based attacks. We also discuss implications and limitations.