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...

In the past two decades, academics and practitioners have attempted to improve understanding of environmental management by classifying companies' environmental behaviour, and evaluating their performance. Driven by both research and societal interest, this has resulted in a wave of stage or...

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in accountability pressures on particularly large global companies. The increased call for transparency comes from two different angles, which show some (potential) convergence in terms of topics and audiences: accountability requirements in the context of...

With increasing attention to sustainable business, reporting by Multinational Corporations (MNCs) about the social and environmental dimensions of their activities - alongside their economic impacts - has become rather common. While research has documented sustainability reporting and looked at...

In this paper we explore how multinational corporations (MNCs) adopt assurance practices to develop and sustain organizational accountability for sustainability. Using a panel of Fortune Global 250 firms over a period of ten years, we document the diffusion patterns of third-party assurance of...

In recent years, attention for corporate governance has not only increased but the notion has also broadened considerably, and started to cover some aspects traditionally seen as being part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR, corporate governance and their interlink seem particularly...

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 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...