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This article examines how responsibility and strategy can and should be connected in a business organization.

The article offers a review of the field by mapping previous studies according to their strategy and responsibility orientations and, consequently, identifies the classic perspective, as well as the major deficiencies and prevailing research gaps in the literature.

The article contributes to the field of strategic corporate responsibility by reframing the field with a contender perspective that challenges the classic view of strategy and responsibility amalgamation. Together, the classic and the contender perspectives are synthesized to form an integrative perspective that is more holistic than those currently available.

The article ends by calling for a reimagining of the relationship between corporate responsibility and strategy to find promising future research avenues and effective business practices suitable to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the research question of how stakeholder claims for transparency work as a means to support responsibility in the international supply chain.

This theoretical study analyses the relationship between stakeholder claims for corporate transparency and responsible business in the global context, and develops a conceptual model for further theoretical and empirical work.

The study finds that the call for corporate transparency is insufficient as a means to increase responsibility within international supply chains. The erroneous belief that stakeholder claims for transparency will lead to responsible behaviour is identified as the “transparency fallacy”. The fallacy emerges from the denial of opacity in organisations and the blindness to the conditions of international supply chains (including complexity, distance, and resistance) that work against attempts to increase transparency.

Acknowledging the limits of the transparency mechanism in both management theory and practice is necessary in order to advance responsible business in the international arena. Being conceptual in nature, the generic limitations of the type of research apply.

While acknowledging opacity, corporate managers and stakeholders should focus on changing the supply chain conditions to support responsible behaviour. This includes reducing complexity, distance, and resistance in the supply network.

This study contests the commonly assumed link between corporate transparency and responsibility, and sheds light on the limits and unintended consequences of stakeholder attempts to impose transparency on business organisations.

In search of new perspectives on sustainable food production, this paper focuses on three fields of literature, namely corporate responsibility (CR), supply chain management (SCM) and strategy. The purpose of this paper is to identify the recent theoretical developments and then integrate them in a framework for studying and managing corporations.

Conceiving socio‐cultural and economic systems within the ecosystem, this paper call for research in the food sector that takes the planetary boundaries into consideration and places the essential needs of the world's poor onto the research agenda of CR, SCM and strategy.

First, a new perspective on CR could be “holistic and beyond responsive”, as it emphasizes the focal actor's role. Second, SCM could be strengthened at its interface with sustainability by the “bottom of the pyramid” view, as it looks for new ways to make business models and operations beneficial for poor communities. And third, in examining the strategies for these two, the strategy‐as‐practice perspective might prove useful, as it is not only limited to organizational practice but also includes the concepts of organizational praxis and practitioners.

This paper argues that these new perspectives are promising avenues for managing and studying business in the food sector, and thus have implications for both academia and industry.

The framework provided in the paper combines three important areas of business research for sustainable development, namely CR, SCM and strategy.