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This paper aims to explore the potential relationship between internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the decline of organised labour in countries of the global North. Given the opposing trends since the late 20th century and the widespread adherence of internationally recognised labour standards in CSR codes, standards, and reporting frameworks, questions arise about the disparity between CSR rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees. The paper further explores the tendency in CSR scholarship to overlook violations of collective rights for in-house employees in the global North.

To examine whether there is an elective affinity between the rise of CSR and the decline of organised labour, the paper uses a discursive institutionalism approach, providing a meta-theoretical analysis of academic literature on internal CSR. A scoping review methodology was used to identify relevant literature and compile it into an empirical corpus for a metatheoretical analysis. The empirical corpus, consisting of 38 articles, was generated through a Google Scholar (GS) search guided by the following questions: (1) What are the dominant conceptual framings of internal CSR? (2) What are the dominant roles and practical aspects of internal CSR?

The paper identifies two key disparities in the literature: (1) between rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees in the global North and (2) between the extensive CSR research on violations of collective rights of value chain workers and the limited attention to in-house employees’ collective rights. The analysis highlights two factors contributing to these disparities: the integration of internal CSR into the corporate managerial toolbox and the distinction in CSR discourse between core labour standards and workplace issues. The analysis shows that internal CSR has an elective affinity with the decline of organised labour.

While scoping reviews are often standalone studies, this paper used the methodology for its stated purpose. Limitations include the broad span of internal CSR across various academic fields and reliance solely on GS. Measures taken to enhance inclusivity were unlimited review period, refined inclusion criteria and keywords during the selection process and cross-checks of cited articles.

Considering the implications of the decline of organised labour on workers’ collective voice, poverty and the distribution gap in wealth and income, this paper suggests that for CSR to play a significant role in advancing sustainable social justice, scholars and practitioners should look at ways to reduce the disparity between rhetoric and practice regarding employees’ voice and collective rights.

The paper lays the foundation for a better understanding of the potential links between internal CSR and the decline of organised labour. It addresses a gap in the literature on the interrelations between CSR and organised labour in the global North and proposes root causes of this gap. This contribution enriches the scarce literature exploring the potential elective affinity between CSR and transformations in the global economy and labour markets since the late 1980s. Finally, the paper deepens the understanding of the implications of CSR for employees’ collective rights and voice as well as for organised labour.

This study aims to critically discuss and reorient the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) debate toward the idea of addressing and rectifying the pervasive structural inequalities that DEI, in its undiluted form rooted in social justice (SJ), aims to combat. Drawing on Bourdieu, the study first examines the diffusion and contestation of DEI into international business (IB). It then proposes a Bourdieu-inspired agenda to advance the transposition of SJ principles into IB.

The study interpretively reconstructs the process of DEI’s ideational diffusion. It examines how the interplay between ideas and field dynamics in IB shapes ideational processes and outcomes.

In response to rising global inequalities – to which multinational enterprises (MNEs) have significantly contributed – SJ movements have propelled DEI into the wider social and political arena, including corporate boardrooms. Within IB, a diluted version of DEI – IB-DEI – emerged as a paradigm to improve MNEs’ performance, but failed to address underlying structural inequalities. As the social impacts, utility and legitimacy of DEI have been challenged, the DEI debate has come to a flux. The study proposes conceptual and contextual extension of DEI within IB and advancing socially engaged research and practice that help reinforce DEI’s core SJ purpose – tackling structural inequalities.

The study is one of the few to openly tackle SJ-IB contradictions on DEI, while advancing the application of Bourdieu to critical studies of IB.

Following the lead of neighboring fields such as strategy and organization studies, entrepreneurship is gradually joining in the adoption of a practice perspective. Entrepreneurship as practice (EaP) is thus a nascent domain of investigation where the methodological debate is still unsettled and very fluid. In this paper, the authors contribute to this debate with a focus on family entrepreneurship.

The authors develop a conceptual paper to discuss what it entails to look at family entrepreneurship through a practice lens and why it is fruitful. Moreover, the authors propose a research strategy novel to the field through which such investigation can be pursued, namely process tracing, and examine its inferential logic.

Process tracing is a strategy of data analysis underpinned by an ontology of causal mechanisms. The authors argue that it complements other practice methods by inferring social mechanisms from empirical evidence and thereby establishing a connection between praxis, practices and practitioners.

Process tracing helps the articulation of an “integrated model” of practice that relates praxis, practices and practitioners to the outcome they jointly produce. By enabling the assessment of impact, process tracing helps providing prima facie evidentiary grounds for policy action and intervention.

Process tracing affinity with the practice perspective has been so far acknowledged only to a limited extent in the social sciences, and it is, in fact, a novel research strategy for the family entrepreneurship field.

The study examines how calculative practices and accountability appear in a rural community of marginalised people in Egypt who depend on jasmine plantations that contribute to the production of global essences.

The data were collected from various sources, namely conversations with villagers, documents and relevant videos and news available on social media and the Internet. This study draws on the concepts of social accountability, the politics of blame avoidance and using calculative practices as a language to explain accountability in context.

The author found a lack of accountability on the part of the government and business owners, with serious implications for the livelihoods of people in a community that has been wholly dependent on jasmine plantations for a century. Power holders have deployed a blame-shifting game to avoid social responsibility. In response, calculative practices rather than advanced accounting tools are used by the poor in the community to induce power holders to be accountable.

The findings of this study show that authorities need to take proactive steps to address the disadvantaged position of powerless people in the lower echelons of society, recognising their accountability for those people.

This paper enhances the understanding of the status of calculative practices and accountability in a community of marginalised people who contribute to the production of global commodities. The paper also enhances the understanding of what goes on behind the scenes with popular and prestigious commodities, whose development is initiated in poor countries, with the end product marketed in rich Western countries.

This paper aims to critically examine how dual-listed multinational enterprises (MNEs) that are embedded across multiple national contexts interact with other actors to shape the diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) narrative, outcomes and the associated dynamics of social change in the mining industry.

The authors use data from the publicly available sustainability reports of two global mining conglomerates with dual-listing structure, Rio Tinto and Anglo American, alongside prevalent DEI regulations in the UK, Australia and South Africa to understand how DEI discourse and practice and the corresponding role of key actors have evolved since 2015. The authors combine a case study approach with topic modelling and qualitative content analysis to critically analyse the linkage between actors’ stated posture and actions in their DEI field and their impact upon various exchange relationships within the mining industry exchange field over the period 2015–2021.

The analysis revealed three broad phases of evolution in the DEI involvement of the MNEs emphasizing on diversity, equality and inclusion, respectively. Both firms progressed at a different pace across the three phases highlighting the need for a systemic perspective when addressing DEI concerns.

This paper is one of the earliest to adopt an issue and exchange field perspective towards examining the complexity of DEI. Taking a critical performative stance, the authors argue that for improving convergence between MNEs’ DEI rhetoric and reality and to advance DEI in new ways organizations and policymakers must devise structural interventions in the DEI field that substantively impact MNEs’ industry exchange field relationships.

Owing to dual constraints including liability of foreignness and liability of origin when emerging multinationals internationalize, they inevitably face the challenge of overseas legitimation. However, few studies have explored how latecomers cross the threshold of legitimacy in the dynamic context of transnational operation. The purpose of this paper is to unravel the evolution process, triggers and specific strategies of overseas legitimacy threshold crossing of emerging multinationals.

Through the longitudinal case study of Haier Group and Goldwind Sci & Tech Co., Ltd, this study investigates the periodical characteristics of overseas legitimacy threshold crossings and the co-evolution among critical factors influencing the legitimation process in the host country.

First, it summarizes that the legitimacy threshold in the host country experiences a sequential process from pragmatic legitimacy to normative legitimacy, and finally cognitive legitimacy. It is an inevitable choice for emerging multinational enterprises to realize and sustain legitimation from passive adaptation to active creation. Second, it reveals that the triggers for crossing the threshold of overseas legitimacy include periodically dynamic factors – international network linkage and resource system reconfiguration, as well as cross-stage spiral interaction effects. Third, it determines the specific strategies for crossing the threshold of overseas legitimacy, namely, replacement, upgrading and reconstruction of organizational identity, and reveals the important role of insisting on the country-of-origin Facebook in promoting the legitimation.

This study enriches the legitimacy threshold crossing literature from an evolutional perspective, especially the traditional static legitimacy research. This study also reveals the key impacting factors – international network linkage and resource system reconfiguration – and their evolution process interacted with the legitimation process.

The emerging multinationals should break the stereotypes from developed markets in that only creating new cognitive patterns through active legitimate strategies can they truly cross the legitimacy threshold in the host country. The emerging multinationals also need to retain their own home country legitimacy traits – Facebook and balance the relation between the image of the home country and the image of host country.

This paper investigates the process of overseas legitimacy threshold crossing for emerging multinationals in a dynamic context of transnational operation, particularly with respect to the evolutionary role played by international network linkage and resource system reconfiguration.

Changes in regulation systems make professional organizations more likely to undergo rapid, profound and radical change. The issue of how micro-institutional change in professional organizations can be carried out is somewhat ignored.

We conducted a process study of a primary hospital in China to trace a pathway through which low-status professionals successfully proceed with radical change at the micro-level.

We present a model involving three strategies that, reconfiguring jurisdictional boundaries in combination, activate low-status professionals' long-standing implicit jurisdictions: expertise redefinition, value reorientation and promotion.

Our study contributes to understanding how low-status professionals reconcile needs for change with contradictions from the core attributes and ambiguities of professional work. Rather than mixed practices enhancing the role of dominant professions, a desire to separate jurisdiction space opens up the access of newly dominant experts.

Changes in the regulation system make professional organizations more likely to undergo rapid, profound and radical change. The issue of how micro-institutional change in professional organizations can be carried out is somewhat ignored.

This study aims to advance knowledge in international management research about how researchers’ cultural identity in fieldwork encounters may be grounded in the choice of language in multicultural and multilingual projects.

The study is based on critical reflections on the experience of two co-authors as Chinese nationals conducting research in overseas Chinese multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing economies.

Drawing on social identity theory, the authors demonstrate that the cultural identity and cultural insider/outsider positionality of both the researcher and research participants can be shaped by language, translation and other artefacts in cross-cultural interviews, constantly being shifted, managed and renegotiated during qualitative interviewing. This study highlights the politics of language which, when combined with other forms of power relations, such as the researcher’s perceived status, economic development of the MNCs’ home country and the participants’ organisational hierarchy, affect power distribution between the researcher and participants. Researchers often need to move from being an “insider” to an “outsider” and often to an “in-betweener” at different stages in an interview interaction to balance power.

This study contributes to international debates about the complex interplay of languages, politics and identity in multilingual and multicultural qualitative research. In contributing to these literatures, the authors focus on the relatively under-researched Chinese MNCs in other developing countries including Mongolia and Tanzania. Recommendations for researcher training and reflexivity are proposed.

This study aims to examine the relationship between institutional logics and specifications quality, and how this relationship is mediated by the legitimacy of the procurement process and stewardship behaviour.

This study draws on insights from institutional logics theory, and legitimacy and stewardship behaviour literature. We conducted an extended literature review to gain a comprehensive understanding of “institutional logics” and their manifestations in organizational contexts, utilizing the 2000–2024 data collected from the EBSCO, Scopus and Web of Science databases, complemented with Google Scholar. We gather that institutional logics manifest in several forms, and that while some organizations may thrive on a single logic, in certain contexts institutional logics can manifest in combinations – “multiple logics or hybrids”. Based on this understanding, we developed testable research hypotheses, predicting the influences of institutional logics – professional logic, efficient service logic and delivery (market) logic, on legitimacy, stewardship behaviour and specifications quality. We then carried out an empirical study, adopting a quantitative cross-sectional survey design with a self-administered questionnaire to test the hypothesized relationships. The empirical data were obtained from 162 procuring and disposing entities in Uganda and analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique.

The study findings reveal that institutional logics exert a strong positive effect on the legitimacy of the procurement process and on stewardship behaviour, which, in turn, both positively influence specifications quality.

The study findings have implications for theory and practice. The study findings provide useful insights that support the conceptual and theoretical development of institutional logics theory and applications in procurement literature. In addition, the study findings enhance procurement managers’ understanding of the mechanisms through which institutional logics can foster specifications quality. However, considering the fact that the study was conducted in a single country context, and focused on the public sector only, the findings of the study might not be generalizable globally.

This study contributes to established knowledge about quality management and procurement by examining the legitimacy of the procurement process and stewardship behaviour of those involved in procurement processes as mechanisms through which procuring entities are able to use institutional logics to enhance specifications quality. In addition, the study highlights areas for future research that may be explored to increase understanding of the value of institutional logics in ensuring specifications quality, and the link between specifications quality and the general performance of procuring entities.

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of aural accounting (AA) on companies’ stakeholder relationship capability in the Iranian capital market.

In terms of methodology, this study adopts a mixed approach based on both inductive and deductive foundations. The goal is to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework regarding the feasibility and practical implementation of AA and to assess its impact on the ability to interact with stakeholders. In this research, the components of AA were identified through a meta-synthesis process. Subsequently, data on these variables were collected using a researcher-made questionnaire. Additionally, a standard questionnaire was used to measure the stakeholders' interaction capability. The study used partial least squares structural equation modeling for hypothesis testing. A total of 412 participants, consisting of financial managers and heads of accounting departments of capital market companies, were involved in hypothesis testing.

The results of this study indicate that AA has a significant and positive impact on companies’ stakeholder relationship capabilities. In other words, AA establishes a bidirectional flow of information, enabling companies to demonstrate a more appropriate response to the changing needs of their stakeholders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first research to present a framework for AA and examine its impact on companies' interaction capabilities with stakeholders. Consequently, the findings not only contribute to the expansion of theoretical literature in accounting and financial reporting but also provide multiple practical implications for capital market policymakers and standard setters regarding the potential consequences of AA.