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This chapter explores the concept of authenticity in the context of today’s highly competitive hospitality industry. Drawing on the multi-sited ethnographic case study of Ziferblat, the world’s first pay-per-minute cafe franchise, the author examines how the imperative of authenticity is addressed by small international enterprises falling in between the categories of chain and independent. By tracing how Ziferblat’s original concept, shaped by the personal and socioeconomic background of its founder, was subsequently transformed by the local teams and adapted to different cultural-geographical contexts, this chapter adds new empirical evidence to the dynamic and pluralistic notion of multiple authenticities.

This qualitative study explores how multinational enterprises (MNEs) approach sustainable innovation through the lens of innovation theory and doughnut economics. The study proposes a conceptual framework to evaluate the practices of businesses and the findings illustrate how sustainable innovation occurs within two MNEs. Based on interviews with professionals of two Swedish MNEs, responsible for sustainability, the study examines how sustainable innovations lead to the redesign of core business pillars and transforms the operating market for the MNE. Overall, this study makes a theoretical contribution by formulating an application of Raworth’s (2017) doughnut model to business strategy. It also provides practical insight into the dynamics of sustainable innovation, which aims to inform and inspire further progress in sustainable development by businesses and academia.

This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.