This paper builds on the assumption that smaller firms that operate on sustainable business models at outset have the capacities to innovate and drive change proactively on a national and international scope. In the literature, this special breed of SME has been labelled “Born Sustainable Firms’ (BSFs). The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature and delve into the organizational characteristics, innovative practices, and ecosystems of partners that distinguish Born Sustainable SMEs as recognised by the literature as the key characteristics of these firms. It aims to uncover how these firms embed environmental and social considerations into their DNA, the innovative approaches they adopt to address sustainability challenges, and how their network of partners (on an international and national level) supports or constrains their sustainable development objectives.

Economic inequality is a major societal concern with implications for business and management. Recent literature in business and management demonstrated multifaceted effects of business on inequality, as well as effects of inequality on business operations. This paper argues that an important next step for this literature will be to consider the moral dimension of inequality and engage with questions of distributive justice – the different theories and principles for a just distribution of economic goods and burdens in society. A systematic literature review is conducted to map the literature on topics related to distributive justice in business and management across various sub-fields. We find that the bulk of the literature has focused on distributive justice in an organisational justice context, studying the drivers and outcomes of the distributive justice perceptions of organisational actors. A smaller set of literature considers the role of business for societal-level distributive justice. Philosophical theories of distributive justice are used in some studies, with John Rawls’ Theory of Justice being the most widely used. Based on the review, the paper discusses the step from organisational justice to societal-level distributive justice in management and explores potential benefits and challenges of increased engagement with philosophical distributive justice theories.

This paper is one of the pioneering academic studies which has used fiction (novel) as a context to analyse liability of foreignness (LOF); a concept which has been significantly studied and analysed so far in the extant literature. The paper presents arguments concerning how use of fiction has potential to enrich understanding of such a multifaceted concept. The current work-in-process paper uses the novel “A Bend in the River” by Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul as a setting to present the immigrant entrepreneurs navigation of individual, structural and contextual factors by analysing their journey through Boudieu’s social capital theory. Specifically, Bourdieu’s arguments concerning field, capital and habitus are used to analyse navigation of LOF by immigrant entrepreneurs in the chosen novel.

This paper aims to highlight the challenges associated with the agency required from the IB researcher to make decisions related to translation of data, in particular when moving between languages using different alphabets. We argue that translation is a value laden process where the translator has an agentic role, making decisions in the translation process that need to be unpacked and made transparent to achieve methodological rigor.

We draw on an empirical study carried out in the Urdu language in Pakistan to highlight the methodological challenges and opportunities in transcription and translation between languages. We highlight a particularly unexplored implication of translation within the management literature as being the very act of transcription itself, which is a first step in transforming data from the oral to the written, and demonstrate how choices made by the researcher at this stage can influence the entire analytical process.

Building on this experience, the paper presents a framework to guide IB researchers dealing with multilingual data, particularly as it relates to transcription and translation processes. Furthermore, we discuss how such a framework provides a space in which to break open broader epistemological questions about how translation decisions affect our knowledge production processes.

Research on the cultural aspects of glocalization in the International Business field often uses the metaphor of ‘flow’ to describe the global consumer cultures. Despite the theoretical and empirical richness, by grounding on the global–local dyad, previous works reached an impasse in (1) explaining the formation of various global cultural forms within a local context and (2) the dynamic local institutions that co-evolve with interactions between local actors. This research project proposes using the ‘wave’ metaphor as an alternative perspective for studying glocalization. We study how Western and non-Western pop music are refracted when they pass through the Vietnamese youthscape. The findings from our seven-year ethnographic study show that young Vietnamese consumers experience Western and non-Western pop music as gender-based structures, based on which they deal with their socialization and individualization to fit with the transition of the Vietnamese market. Surprisingly, the global-local dyad has been replaced by other dyads, such as mainstream/marginal tastes and young consumers/government in the diffusion/adoption of Western and non-Western pop music.