This article examines the case of sustainable coffee as faced by Sara Lee’s International Coffee and Tea Division (SL), asking which strategic direction the company should take considering its regulatory, competitive and societal contexts. More than a decade after sustainable coffee became a...

Anecdotal evidence often suggests that multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in developing countries “exploit their multinationality” to avoid paying taxes to host governments. This article explores the concept of “responsible tax” as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) issue...

While business-NGO partnerships have received much attention in recent years, insights have been obtained from research in ‘stable' contexts, not from conflict-ridden countries where such collaboration may be even more crucial in building trust and capacity and in addressing governance...

In the past decade, a sizable body of literature has built up on the concept and characteristics of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Western countries, where it has also been referred to as sustainability. More recently, attention has grown for CSR in emerging countries. Remarkably,...

In the field of global rule-setting for responsible business behaviour, multi-stakeholder standards have emerged in recent years because of their potential for effective consensus-building, knowledge-sharing and interest representation. Proponents also hold that multi-stakeholder standards could...

This paper aims to shed some more light on the current debate related to corporate social responsibility (CSR), specifically considering multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the complexities they face when dealing with international issues and a range of stakeholders. It discusses notions of CSR...

While publications on the regional nature of multinational enterprises (MNEs) have sparked a lively debate about the nature and measurement of regionalization and (semi)globalization, and performance implications are starting to be addressed, the broader societal and sustainability dimensions...

While attention to the social and environmental impacts of international business (IB) is not new, the past years have seen renewed interest due to pressing global problems such as climate change and poverty. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are regarded as playing a specific role given their...

The international debate on addressing global climate change increasingly points at the role that companies can play by using their innovative capacity. However, up till now companies have been rather cautious in taking decisive steps in facilitating an innovation-based transition towards a...

The potential contribution of companies as partners in furthering development objectives is frequently mentioned, but has received limited research attention. What has also remained unclear is to what extent companies can play such a role via the various individual and collaborative means...