This empirical survey is based on a questionnaire which was distributed to 6,000 medium-sized German companies with international activities. The analyses included responses from a total of 533 enterprises. The areas examined include the importance of globalization, the motives for and the...

Recent work on early internationalisers and born-global firms emphasises the entrepreneurial orientation of these firms. In contrast, this paper analyses the neglected, but nonetheless prevalent, phenomenon of firms that enter foreign markets at a relatively early stage because their home...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) dominate the governance of global value chains (GVCs), such that according to the concept of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR), they are responsible to address governance gaps throughout the chains, even at the level of their independent suppliers....

The United Nations Global Compact – which is a Global Public Policy Network advocating ten universal principles in the areas of human rights, labour standards, environmental protection, and anti-corruption – has turned into the world’s largest corporate responsibility initiative. Although...

In this chapter, we are particularly interested in the contracting arrangements of MNCs with suppliers in less developed countries which have been labelled as ‘sweatshops’. Critical stakeholders from civil society, such as labour and human rights activists, trade unions and non-governmental...