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Alain Verbeke is professor of international business strategy and holds the McCaig Research Chair in management at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He was previously the director of the MBA programme, Solvay Business School, University of Brussels. He has also been visiting professor at Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto and the Université Catholique de Louvain, as well as an associate fellow of Templeton College (University of Oxford). He is presently academic associate of the Centre for International Business and Management, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

This chapter complements the one that appeared as “History of the AIB Fellows: 1975–2008” in Volume 14 of this series (International Business Scholarship: AIB Fellows on the First 50 Years and Beyond, Jean J. Boddewyn, Editor). It traces what happened under the deanship of Alan Rugman (2011–2014) who took many initiatives reported here while his death in July 2014 generated trenchant, funny, and loving comments from more than half of the AIB Fellows. The lives and contributions of many other major international business scholars who passed away from 2008 to 2014 are also evoked here: Endel Kolde, Lee Nehrt, Howard Perlmutter, Stefan Robock, John Ryans, Vern Terpstra, and Daniel Van Den Bulcke.

The Booz & Co./strategy+business Eminent Scholar in International Management is an annual award given by the International Management Division of the Academy of Management and Sponsored by Booz & Co./strategy+business.

Alain Verbeke is one of the world’s leading thinkers on international business (IB) and globalization, a renowned scholar and educator who contributes to creating a better global business environment by addressing some of today’s most critical challenges. He was one of the first scholars to advance a theoretically rigorous and practically significant perspective on international corporate social responsibility (CSR). Verbeke’s work on international CSR is particularly impactful because it is rooted in IB theory and based on a realistic set of assumptions about the behavior of managers, policymakers, and other market and nonmarket stakeholders. In this chapter, the authors apply theoretical principles central to Verbeke’s research – most notably behavioral assumptions of bounded rationality and bounded reliability – to analyze businesses’ and societies’ pace of progress in relation to stated environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. The authors argue that bounded rationality and reliability challenges create misalignment between stated/imposed commitments toward ESG performance, and economic actors’ ability to deliver on these commitments. The authors discuss examples of such misalignment, focusing on tensions among stakeholders, between stakeholder organizations and firms, and within firms. The authors propose that to be relevant for policy and practice, the sustainability research should be based on realistic microfoundational assumptions.

This research volume honours Alan M. Rugman, who is the L. Leslie Waters Chair in International Business (IB), Professor of Management and Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. The work contains a set of essays developed to celebrate the Academy of Management's (AoM) recognition of Professor Rugman as the ‘Booz Allen Hamilton Strategy and Business Eminent Scholar in International Management’ at the AoM 2004 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Booz Allen Hamilton established this award to recognize eminent scholars whose research and writing have contributed significantly to international management scholarship and whose work has had an effect on the practice of international management. This great honour was not the only one Professor Rugman received in 2004. The European International Business Academy (EIBA) organized a special panel honouring Professor Rugman's 25-year old landmark study on international diversification and the multinational enterprise (MNE) at its 2004 Annual Meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The 10 chapters included in this volume were presented at one of these events or written as a direct result thereof.