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This paper aims to examine social licence in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Social and economic actors can assist in protecting the environment by granting firms a social licence. The social licence is regarded as a regulatory trigger, which some claim can improve organisational practices and possibly induce beyond compliance behaviour.

The paper uses data from interviews with the owners and managers of 110 manufacturing SMEs.

Social licence pressures are generally weak, while traditional regulation remains essential for encouraging and sustaining environmental activity. That said, the data show important differences across firms, for some SMEs are influenced by and responsive to social licence pressures. Typically, these pressures derive from stakeholders who pursue a relatively narrow self-interest (rather than public interest) mandate, and focus on particular issues rather than broader objectives of environmental responsibility. When responding to pressures, SMEs are likely to take specific and focused actions that address specific stakeholder concerns.

Fresh insights are provided into the social licence and smaller firms. Contrary to previous views, there are circumstances where the social licence provides a limited and tailored regulatory tool for initiating change, and it typically leads to firms making alterations to business practices that tend to be low-cost and easy to implement. The social licence can provide a consensual micro-social contract and limited public interest service, and, subject to supporting circumstances, it may be extendable to other types of smaller firms.

The paper presents fresh insights into the relationship between SMEs and social and economic stakeholders.

The paper provides new insights into how relevant stakeholders can influence the environmental behaviour of small firms.

In this study, we explored the behaviour of two Canadian multinational companies operating in the context of Arab Spring events in Egypt in 2011.

We conducted a fine-grained analysis of 171 documents of various secondary sources to understand the behaviour of the two firms in Egypt between 25 January 2011 and 30 June 2012.

We suggest that corporate diplomacy should be viewed as portfolios of interdependent actions rather than reactions to discrete events. We also underline the importance for organisations to have a proactive, holistic and inclusive corporate diplomacy strategy, with the objective to secure and balance both explicit political/legal licence and implicit social licence.

We intentionally focused our empirical analysis on two Canadian firms operating in the same host country and belonging to the same industry. It would be useful to carry similar research in different organisational and institutional contexts.

The purpose of this study is to understand the driving forces of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in organizations and how these social initiatives influence organizations’ “license to operate” using data from the Ghanaian business environment.

This study used purposive sampling with a well-structured questionnaire as a data collection tool. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used to study the driving forces of CSR initiatives in organizations and how these social initiatives influence their social license.

The findings indicate that CSR initiatives are driven by the normative, mimetic, investors and community pressures. The regulative pressure has no significant effect on CSR initiatives. The authors found no difference between the services and the manufacturing sectors as far as the results are concerned using multi-grouping analysis.

From the results, the importance of normative, mimetic, investors and community pressures as the driving forces of CSR are established. The finding indicates that CSR demands by suppliers, customers the extent to which organizations perceive their competitors have benefited from initiating CSR are benefiting, the willingness of investors to invest in companies whose CSR activities are best and the opinion on the extent to which the District Assembly and the Chief Executive in the district, the Chiefs, the Churches, the Opinion leaders have significant impact on CSR initiatives.

The results indicate the need for suppliers and customers to continually demand from corporations to initiate CSR activities as organizations seem to respond to these pressures, and these initiatives are also likely to be mimicked by other organizations in the same industry to enable this drive the social responsibility agenda. Investors and community members are also encouraged to invest and accept, respectively, organizations with very good CSR records to send a signal to companies who see CSR as a cost instead of performance enhancement.

The work illustrates and provides some insights and builds on the literature in the area of CSR from a developing country’s environment. This is also one of the few works that investigate the driving forces of CSR and social license using the institutional theory based on data from the African business environment.

The aim of this paper is to focus on the legitimacy problems faced by the Finnish forest industry in the Brazilian context, specifically from the perspective of the region's indigenous communities: the Tupinikim, the Guarani and the Pataxó.

The method used is qualitative research with a case study approach. The empirical data are based on the fieldwork in the states of Espírito Santo and Bahia. The aim was to scrutinize the corporate tactics in gaining societal legitimacy, both in Brazil and in Finland; these were categorized into thematic groups.

The legitimacy of the Finnish companies becomes questionable due to the unethical tactics of their Brazilian business partner, Aracruz Celulose SA. When the company takes its “marginal” stakeholders' demands seriously and commits itself to them in diverse ways (economically, ecologically etc.), corporate social responsibility becomes a reality. The search for legitimacy also requires the company to change its corporate knowledge production systems, and also requires a willingness on the part of the company to encounter different types of knowledge that are locally attached.

The study offers new information about the relationship between multinational corporations and local communities in Brazil – especially from the perspective of indigenous communities. The paper also contributes to legitimation research. Finally, the authors offer some concluding remarks considering the new cultural environments of Finnish companies operating in the global South.

If a society does not identify with purchase of illegal goods, consumers will undertake more psychological burden when buying the goods. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of social norm of anti‐piracy on social welfare.

This paper uses a theoretical model to consider that although consumers will select piracy goods for the concerns of net utility, due to pressure from social norms, consumers are not wiling to purchase piracy goods.

The results show that enhancement of social norm of anti‐piracy will improve overall social welfare; however, the social norm of anti‐piracy must be limited to certain scope. Extreme social norm of anti‐piracy, in comparison to the situation without social norm of anti‐piracy, will lower overall social welfare.

If complete laws and strict enforcement cannot curb piracy, we can boldly assume that mature and high degree of “rule of low” is the force to restrain purchase of piracy goods. The paper examines the relations between social norm of anti‐piracy and social welfare.

This paper aims to present a systematic review of the literature concerning major aspects of innovation performance and compare the research hotspots of innovation performance in the twenty-first century with three primary purposes: first, to view the trend of Chinese and English literature on innovation performance research; second, to summarize the research streams in innovation performance; and third, to predict possible directions for future innovation performance research.

The authors first introduce a framework of innovation performance research developments. Then they construct a representative data set of bibliographic records, obtaining 1,768 articles in the SSCI citation index database and 1,431 articles in the CSSCI database. The authors then make a comparative analysis from two aspects: research themes and development of academic communities. The research objects are keywords and references so that co-word and co-cited reference networks are established. Finally, the authors combine the direction of research streams about “innovation performance” to summarize 28 questions in three research fields that can be studied in the future.

The momentum of the literature in English on innovation performance is increasing, whereas the Chinese literature has declined in recent years. The direction of research streams in Chinese and English literature is the same: they are the “innovation system/elements” research stream, the “innovation activity/ability” research stream and the “innovation network/social capital” research stream. Although the directions are the same, the specific contents of the research are different. The direction of future development of innovation performance research can be undertaken in three aspects: follow research into expanding hot topics, mine the research of typical academic circles and develop research into exploring more fields. Combined with the direction of research streams, 28 questions in three research fields are summarized.

Based on the background of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” in China, the research on enterprise “innovation performance” is becoming more and more important. The findings help us summarize the research streams related to innovation performance research, better understand the themes that point to directions for future development of innovation performance research and summarize 28 questions.

Building on the resource-based view of the firm the purpose of this paper is to study the intangible resources available for social ventures, and presents a typology of growth strategies based on the intangible resources possessed by those enterprises.

This research applies a multiple case study technique for ten social enterprises in Egypt listed on Ashoka and Schwab Foundation websites. The research employs a purposive sampling technique. Data triangulation is used based on reports, websites, and interviews with social entrepreneurs and employees.

The study has three main findings: describing the intangible resources needed by social ventures to grow; detailing the growth strategies adopted by social ventures and corresponding funding mechanisms; explaining how intangible resources affect the selection of growth strategies, and how these interact with the context to produce expected outcomes. Overall, a typology for growth strategies of social ventures is presented.

This paper is an original attempt to advance research on social enterprises in relation to the RBV and the domain of venture growth and impact scale-up.

This research is beneficial for social ventures and venture philanthropists who wish to learn about the specific resources important for venture growth, and understand the suitable strategies and context for organizational growth and impact scale-up.

This research is one of the few attempts to study and explain the types of intangible resources in social ventures and the role of different resource bundles in deciding social venture growth strategy.

Drawing upon research on the initiatives of Canadian mining companies, this paper examines private efforts in the mining sector to promote acceptable standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This paper asks how important emerging global CSR norms have been in influencing the adoption of CSR policies. Sustainable development is a universally accepted principle of environmental protection, and serves as an important indicator of the influence of global CSR norms on mining companies. Most mining companies have embraced the concept of sustainable development to frame their CSR policies. Emerging global CSR norms have thereby set the macro‐level context in which CSR policies have been adopted and evolved at the micro level.