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In Thailand, the number of higher education institutions (HEIs) offering international programmes has surged dramatically. Internationalisation is seen as key to competing in the higher education market, modernising educational programming, and generating new streams of revenue. Yet, such rapid change is disorientating for the internationalisation of higher education (IHE) in the Thai context. That said, there is little disagreement on what it is not; it is not Thai. This chapter investigates apparent efforts to ‘de-place’ Thailand from IHE and considers how these attempts may connect to (post-)colonial tensions between sovereignty and civilisation. Through a synthesis of scholarship in the areas of higher education, cultural geography and Thai studies, the authors construct a framework for exploring how IHE is both imagined and experienced in Thailand. In particular, they re-examine datasets from studies they conducted with stakeholders over recent years, including executive leadership, international faculty members, and university students. Through a series of narrative portraits, a dialogue of voices is constructed that reflect distinct orientations to ‘Thainess’ in the IHE. The authors argue that a wider and more inclusive orientation to internationalisation is not only respectful of local identity but is enhanced by it. Ultimately, the hope of this study is to offer a vision of what an ‘emplaced’ idea of IHE in Thailand might look like, one grounded in an orientation unique to a particular place with its own cultural and social coordinates.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.

The UK government has taken the lead in accelerating the capacity of higher education to engage with sustainability accounting and adopting a novel systematic approach toward a collective implementation of and contribution to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN SDG 16 “Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions” promotes the (re)building of effective and accountable institutions. In line with the institutional logics metatheory, we provide empirical evidence on how the alignment between social mechanisms alongside the reputation of higher education institutions (HEIs) and SDGs on transparent and responsible service (SDG 16) affect the students' overall experience. Using a sample of 142 UK HEIs, interpretative content analysis and ordinary least squares, the results show that integrating HEIs' responsible-oriented research agenda proactively with high sustainability reputation adds significantly to greater student satisfaction.

Introduction: Cost competitiveness, customer focus, and sustainability compliance are essential for new-age firms to survive and succeed in the VUCA market environment. This study examines how automobile corporations have improved cost competitiveness, productivity, and product quality.

Purpose: This study examines the importance of cost competitiveness, customer focus, and sustainability compliance for the long-term survival of organisations in VUCA markets, looking at the practical efforts made by automobile corporations to enhance cost competitiveness, productivity, and quality.

Methodology: The study utilises a comprehensive analysis of the strategies and initiatives implemented by the selected automobile companies. It involves a review of relevant literature, case studies, financial data analysis, and interviews with key industry experts, providing a holistic understanding of the actions taken by these organisations to achieve their goals.

Findings: The study reveals that cost competitiveness, customer focus, and sustainability compliance are critical factors for the long-term survival and success of organisations in the automotive industry. The analysed automobile companies have undertaken practical efforts to improve cost competitiveness, enhance productivity, and ensure high-quality products, enabling them to navigate the challenges and maintain a competitive edge.

Significance: The findings of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the importance of cost competitiveness, customer focus, and sustainability compliance in the automotive industry. It highlights the need for organisations to constantly monitor both qualitative and quantitative profit to avoid complacency and ensure long-term efficiency. The study’s insights are relevant to businesses operating in other sectors, as they face similar challenges in the VUCA market environment.

International business research is showing an increasing interest in the link between international business and human rights. Despite extensive coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability, the analysis and discussion of why multinational corporations include human rights in corporate reporting is still in its early stages. This chapter develops an analytical framework on corporate human rights reporting, with special emphasis on international business. The conceptual part of the framework draws on legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory and signalling theory. The analytical part distinguishes between factors inside the corporation and the external environment of business organisations operating internationally.

This chapter explores the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from an Islamic Shari'ah-compliant perspective. It provides a comprehensive literature review on CSR with an explicit focus on the Islamic perspective of CSR, Islamic models of CSR, CSR practices in conventional and Islamic banks, and the consequences of CSR to Islamic banks. This chapter's main contribution lies in considering the current CSR literature from a Shari'ah perspective. Likewise, it identifies gaps in the current literature and suggests potential areas for future research. This chapter attempts to improve the understanding of how Islamic banks integrate social responsibility into their operations. The insights from this chapter are helpful to practitioners and academic scholars in Islamic finance, accounting, and CSR. This chapter emphasizes the importance of incorporating Islamic values and principles into CSR practices and encourages further research and investigation in this area.

“First principles” of international business (IB) thinking should be applied systematically when assessing the functioning of internationally operating firms. The most important first principle is that entrepreneurially oriented firms seek to create, deliver and capture economic value through cross-border linkages. Such linkages invariably require complementary resources from a variety of parties with idiosyncratic vulnerabilities to be meshed. Starting from first principles allows bringing to light evidence-based insight. For instance, most companies are not global and even the world’s largest firms rarely change the location of key strategic functions. International new ventures (INVs), emerging economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) and family firms face unique vulnerabilities but also command resources that can be used to create value across borders. The quest for “optimal” international diversification appears to be a futile academic exercise, and in emerging economies with institutional voids, relational networks – and more broadly, informal institutions – are unlikely to function as scalable substitutes for formal institutions. In global value chains (GVCs), many lead firms and their partners have been able to craft governance mechanisms that reduce bounded rationality and bounded reliability challenges, and it is also critical for them to use governance as a tool to create entrepreneurial space. Finally, many of the world’s largest companies have been on successful trajectories toward reducing their climate change footprint for a few decades. But these firm-specific trajectories are fraught with challenges and cannot just be imposed via unilateral, macro-level targets decided upon by individuals and institutions lacking a clear understanding of innovation and capital expenditure processes in business.