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The purpose of this study is to analyze the corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication of the Fortune top-100 companies during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Specifically, the authors examine the messages of international companies' CSR communication to customers during the pandemic, focusing particularly on the companies' posts on Twitter. In addition to identifying what international companies communicate, the authors determine the motives of companies' COVID-19-related CSR communication as well as how companies strategically approach CSR communication.

Using Nvivo, the authors carried out content analysis of the COVID-19-related tweets of the Fortune top-100 companies using Twitter's ‘advanced search’ tool. The analysis included tweets posted between 1 February 2020 and September 2021, a period that represents the peak of the pandemic.

Study findings indicate that COVID-19-related CSR responses of international companies are driven by commitment to organizational values, attainment of recognition for timely response to COVID-19, altruistic motives to combat COVID-19 and congruence with social movements that create expectations from customers to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most companies adopt a response strategy to CSR communication, by informing customers of their COVID-19 responses in relation to several issues such as alterations in companies' processes and the impacts of the pandemic on health.

The study suggests that the CSR practices of companies should be strategically embedded in organizations' international marketing plans and not remain just on-off responses to crises should marketing-related benefits be obtained. Several recommendations are made to strengthen companies' adoption of a proactive, engagement-oriented approach to CSR communication.

The CSR communication of international companies during external crises has not been sufficiently studied in relation to international marketing, as most studies considered internal corporate crises. Focusing on an external crisis (COVID-19 pandemic) with global impacts, this study advances existing knowledge on international companies' CSR communication to their customers. Additionally, this study offers new insights on the role of integrated, coordinated and consistent CSR messages and strategies, which are targeted to the needs and expectations of domestic and international customers in response to COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of interdisciplinary services marketing research and identify basic prerequisites for inter-disciplinary work in the field of services marketing, and to offer directions to services marketing scholars regarding future interdisciplinary research work.

Building on the available literature, the authors argue for the importance of interdisciplinary research in services marketing. The authors also develop a framework featuring “the key challenges impeding interdisciplinarity”, which need to be addressed to shift the services marketing field towards more sensible interdisciplinarity. Further, based on literature synthesis from different disciplines, they provide a framework with “four future research avenues for interdisciplinary research in services marketing”.

The authors identify five challenges that can likely impede services marketing research from progressing into true interdisciplinary work: limited cross-pollination, limited paradoxical thinking, limited conceptual development, limited cross-disciplinary collaboration and “inside–out” focus. The authors also propose four future research avenues to drive interdisciplinary research in the services marketing field: integration of services marketing and information management; linguistic perspectives in services marketing research; the interface between services marketing and medicine; and consumer personality and values in services marketing.

The authors propose two novel frameworks. The first concerns the key challenges of interdisciplinarity in services marketing research and the second provides avenues to drive future interdisciplinary services marketing research.

This article is the editorial for the special issue on “Entrepreneurial Families in Business Across Generations, Contexts and Cultures”. We aim to develop a road map that can help academics and practitioners navigate the findings of the articles contained in this special issue. We also suggest future lines of research around the topic of entrepreneurial families in business.

We develop a conceptual model for interpreting and understanding entrepreneurial families in business across contexts and time.

Our conceptual model highlights the importance of context and time when conducting research on entrepreneurial families in business.

The findings in this special issue will be of relevance for decision makers who tailor policies that embrace different economic and social actors, including entrepreneurial families.

This editorial and the articles that make up this special issue contribute to family business research by contextualising the phenomenon of entrepreneurial families in business. We propose a new holistic perspective to incorporate context and time in the study of entrepreneurial families that own, govern and manage family firms over time.

The purpose of this paper is to study the way in which family ties influence the entrepreneurial preparedness of the diaspora family business owner.

In-depth interviews were carried out with 15 Cypriot family business owners hosted in various countries. The paper draws on social capital theory and uses an abductive analytical approach.

The findings of this paper illustrate that family ties coming from the family across borders play a significant role for diaspora family business owners’ entrepreneurial preparedness. Hidden values deriving from the interpersonal relationships within the family across borders drive the diaspora family business owners to learn upon self-reflection and become entrepreneurially prepared, led by both urgency and esteem.

This study provides practical implications for the entrepreneurial preparedness of diaspora family business owners and those who wish to become family business owners in a diaspora context.

This study contributes theoretically through the conceptualization of “family across borders social capital” and “diaspora entrepreneurial preparedness”. It also contributes empirically to the fields of diaspora family business, entrepreneurial learning and diaspora entrepreneurship through new knowledge regarding the role of family across borders social capital in the entrepreneurial preparedness of the diaspora family business owner.

The purpose of this study is to systematically collate and scrutinize the state of the art on consumer cosmopolitanism (CCOS) from an international marketing perspective and to provide a foundation for future research on the subject matter to proliferate and prosper.

A systematic review of the extant literature was conducted focusing on peer-reviewed journal articles published in major marketing, international business and management journals.

A systematic analysis of 44 journal articles shows that CCOS research is a rapidly growing research stream in the international marketing field. However, at the same time, the results reveal a lack of coherent and consistent conceptual underpinning, conflicting empirical findings regarding the profile and behavior of cosmopolitan consumers, persisting knowledge gaps, as well as methodological and contextual weaknesses.

This paper is the first to consolidate the pertinent literature on CCOS. In doing so, it provides a roadmap for future research with reference to theory, context and methodology based on the research inconsistencies and knowledge gaps identified, contributing toward the development of this research area.

This study aims to explore the dynamics enabling strategic account management (SAM) to function as a value co-creation selling model in the pharmaceutical industry.

Using an inductive qualitative research design, data are collected within 11 industry customers in Canada. This work focuses on hospitals as strategic accounts of pharmaceutical companies, exploring SAM value co-creation in the “hospital-pharmaceutical company” relationship.

The findings suggest the presence of two key dimensions that can enable a value co-creation SAM model in the hospital-pharmaceutical relationship: “customer-tailored value-added initiatives” and “relationship enhancers”. Customer-tailored value-added initiatives explain the activities that are central to the hospital-pharmaceutical company relationship and can lead to the provision of value added that is unique to the hospital. Relationship enhancers explain the activities that can help strengthen hospital-pharmaceutical company relations in the pursuit of enhanced value-added interactions between the two parties. The research demonstrates a cyclical relationship between “customer-tailored value-added initiatives” and “relationship enhancers”, leading to value co-creation through a SAM model.

The study informs pharmaceutical industry practitioners on how to improve their value proposition through new, more sustainable selling practices. It offers information on implementing a value co-creation SAM model, which can enable pharmaceutical companies to sustain long-lasting value-added relationships with key accounts such as hospitals.

The study contributes to the field of SAM by conceptualizing SAM as a value co-creation system. It introduces new knowledge in pharmaceutical marketing by offering empirical insight on the applicability and use of SAM in the hospital-pharmaceutical company dyad.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the conditions underpinning the cooperative relationships between family businesses. The role of trust is also explored, given the focus on informal conditions nested within the cooperation between firms.

A case study research method is adopted in this paper. This research is conducted within a cooperative association in Cyprus where 40 retail family businesses trade under the same brand.

The findings suggest that cooperation between family businesses emerges and unfolds as a result of the presence and interrelationships between a number of critical conditions: trust, altruism, collective thinking, stewardship, friendship, and family values congruence. The work illustrates that trust becomes a catalyst to the emergence and maintenance of cooperative relations between family businesses. Trust between family leaders is important in building altruism, collective thinking, and stewardship norms amongst them, and helps in sustaining the cooperation between their respective firms. At the same time, trust (stemming from past friendship and values congruence between diverse family leaders) becomes important in bringing family businesses to cooperate together at first instance. Further, the findings stress the role of critical events and self-interest in moderating the role and influence of trust on the cooperation between family businesses.

This paper contributes to the family business field through new knowledge on the relations between family businesses and the unique conditions that shape their long-term cooperation.

By combining manifold approaches from migrant entrepreneurship and family business studies, the purpose of the paper is to shed some light upon the contextual features of motivation, resources, generational pathways of Turkish migrant family entrepreneurs in Berlin – through the lens of a mixed and multiple embeddedness approach.

An explorative research design, based on an eclectic theoretical framework and on purposive sampling, combines qualitative in-depth interviews/content analysis and on-site observation resulting in an almost ethnographic assessment of selected case studies of Turkish migrant family entrepreneurs (concerning age (min. 20 years), size (15+ employees) and currently at a stage of succession).

The results show that despite specific strategies vary – four circumstances hold true for all cases: (1) firm trajectories were characterized by little strategic planning and mostly trail-and error processes in the past and business survival is highly dependent on owner families; (2) owner families heavily relied on personal, family and collective resources, not benefiting from promotion programmes or micro-funding measures for SMEs; (3) owner families have actively developed their (mixed) embeddings during the growth of their migrant business beyond the single ethnic group at various spatial scales; (4) succession adds another layer of context – what we call here multiple embeddedness – with ambivalent effects: emerging potentials and conflicts between the preceding and succeeding generation.

Results have shown that is it necessary to set up both: customized funding opportunities for migrant start-ups in general and succession consulting for migrant family entrepreneurs in particular. Given the magnitude of family migrant entrepreneurs and the accelerating migration patterns in most Western European countries, there is urgent need for such measures.

Family entrepreneurship has been often discussed without a migration perspective, neither taking a systematic look at pertinent motivation, resources, and future trajectories nor context. Migrant entrepreneurship studies barely take the family or family-specific issues (e.g. succession) into account, and mainly deal with the integration or economic aspects. Our mixed and multiple embeddedness approach allows for a holistic view on transgenerational migrant family entrepreneurship by integrating both socio-spatial (actor, family, network, micro, meso, macro) and multi-generational contexts (preceding, succeeding).