Recent international business research examines how multinational enterprises (MNEs) can contribute to alleviating grand challenges by integrating societal concerns in their core business operations. We study how MNEs can navigate pressures for social and commercial value creation by engaging in corporate social innovation (CSI). Building on the strategy tripod perspective on international business activities, we argue that it is key to consider the interdependencies between institution-, industry-, and resource-based factors as drivers of CSI engagement. The reason is that CSI can function as a strategic response to institution-based regulatory pressure for social value creation and industry-based competitive pressure for commercial viability. However, CSI engagement comes with significant challenges, necessitating careful consideration of firm resources. Configurational analyses of a cross-national sample of MNEs in the banking sector between 2017 and 2022 support these ideas. They also reveal that MNEs display considerable discretion in CSI engagement, choosing to engage substantially even in the absence of institutional and industrial pressures. These findings illuminate an emerging phenomenon by highlighting CSI’s value as an approach to address contradictory environmental demands, and identifying the unique resource bundles required for MNEs’ engagement.

The systemic change for sustainability requires agency from multiple actors, including business, policy and societal actors. Despite the generally shared understanding that the transition to sustainable business and society is necessary and urgent, the understandings of how to make the transition happen vary between different actors. The tightening regulations create challenges as companies try to adapt to the constantly emerging new needs in their international business and value chains, whereas policymakers struggle with balancing the respective regulatory frameworks with other challenges on their agenda. Our study explores the complexity of finding common ground for agency towards green transition between multiple actors at multiple levels. Specifically, we seek to answer the following question: How are different actors motivated to pursue green transition, individually and collectively? To answer this question, we generate a framework combining concepts from the literature on opportunity beliefs and literature on collective agency. Empirically, our study explores green transition in the shipbuilding industry context, thus focusing particularly on the environmental dimension of sustainability, and analysing it in an industry with highly complex products and production networks and high negative environmental impact.

International shipping is among the hard-to-decarbonize sectors in global value chains (GVCs), requiring a shift to cleaner fuel sources. We investigate how actors in maritime transport address and promote the environmental upgrading of GVCs during field-configuring events (FCEs) in order to navigate the energy transition, and find that actors aim to navigate technological, political, market and financial uncertainty via FCEs and thus to escape the “fuel roulette”. With ports as the focal point of the study, we contribute at the nexus of environmental upgrading of GVCs, maritime economics and temporality literatures, by opening up the role of ports and other key GVC actors in maritime energy transition and by shedding light on the environmental upgrading process of GVCs through a temporality lens.

IB scholars mostly focus on the tensions and complexities in MNEs sustainability and circularity practices and strategies throughout their global value chains in sustainability, climate change and circular economy research, where the perspective of MNEs’ global supply network in this phenomenon has rarely been examined. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on the supplier firms CE related strategies and its impact on MNEs vision for transitioning GVCs toward CE. The role of MNEs in the suppliers’ strategies development will be investigated in this paper. The paper integrates the Transition Management (TM) theory and Business Systems theory in order to define the key strategic fundamentals and the role and complementarity of institutional dynamics in CE transition in MNE-Supplier perspective.

The findings of the paper offer a conceptual framework for CE transition with the supplier firms’ strategies that imply competences, collaboration and capabilities reconfiguration in four different levels of governance in transition management i.e. strategic, tactical, operational and reflexive. The study found MNEs’ role to diffuse CE driven vision to their global suppliers with a cooperative and collaborative approach by incentivizing the strategies and initiatives related to CE transition. Supplier firms need to conform with the vision of CE Transition.

The focus of this research is the strategy execution, more specifically, investigating the process of incorporating Environmental (E), Social (S) and Governance (G) issues in the strategic agenda, defining specific corporate goals and translating them into practical plans to be implemented in the international context of multinational companies. We perform a systematic literature review to explore the studies about ESG strategy implementation with the objective to integrate the literature developed in the different fields covered and to propose a research agenda for future studies.

We provide a contribution to the development of theory by examining how the international context affects strategy execution. For practitioners, this work can help MNCs to refine their practices to increase the chances of achieving corporate goals towards sustainability.

The social dimension of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices of companies is a driver of diversity and inclusion, thus contributing to a more sustainable working environment. However, practices differ between countries regarding compliance and the effective attention paid to the social dimension in ESG practices. We aim to identify whether academic research reflects this difference or contributes to convergence. To this end, we make a bibliometric analysis to map the international scientific production on social diversity in the context of ESG. This article analyses the production of knowledge through maps, clusters and figures generated with the use of VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. We present a historical overview of the academic research with a comparison between countries, authors, and journals. We show the differences and similarities in the keywords to highlight the central topics in research at these three levels with a focus on differences between high and middle/low-income countries.

International Business has consistently been criticized as a significant contributor to environmental and climate issues. Using a global dataset from 26,982 firms across 41 countries, this study finds that while multinationality results in MNEs causing more environmental detriment beyond their fair share, it also encourages MNEs to exert greater efforts towards environmental improvement compared to non-multinational firms. Through the lenses of strategic objectives, organizational structure, and resource allocation, we pinpoint multinationality as a primary driver of environmental practices. However, beyond substantive actions, multinationality is also associated with symbolic actions. Our findings further suggest the mediating role of stakeholders. Two pivotal stakeholders, consumers and regulators, exert divergent impacts on symbolic actions. Specifically, consumer pressure positively correlates with symbolic actions, while regulatory pressure dampens such behaviors. Additionally, our results indicate that indirect exposure weakens the effects of multinationality. This research not only contributes to the literature on strategies for orchestrating solutions to grand challenges and sustainability in international business, but also offers insights for optimizing the role of multinational corporations in addressing grand challenges.