CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of the Journal of International Business Studies

MNEs IN THE AGE OF RESILIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY

IMPERATIVES AND TENSIONS

Special Issue Editors:  

• Gabriel R.G. Benito (BI Norwegian Business School, Norway, [log in to unmask])
• Valentina De Marchi (ESADE Business School, Spain, [log in to unmask])
• Anthony Goerzen (Queen’s University, Canada, [log in to unmask])
• Torben Pedersen (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, [log in to unmask])
• Lucia Piscitello (Politecnico di Milano, Italy, [log in to unmask])
• Supervising Editor: Ruth V. Aguilera (Northeastern University, US, [log in to unmask])

Deadline for Submission: January 31, 2025

Motivation for the Special Issue

We live in an age characterized by the requirement for economic viability coupled with the emerging imperatives of resilience and environmental sustainability. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are facing emergent pressures from regulators, customers, employees, and other stakeholders to become more sustainable, e.g., the need to decarbonize and improve the circularity of resource use and novel opportunities (Montiel et al., 2021; Yu et al., 2023). At present, only a small fraction of materials used in manufacturing are recycled; the bulk are virgin materials extracted from the earth, most of which ends up as landfill waste (ICLEI, 2022). This wastage contributed to the climate emergency, providing a mounting pressure on MNEs to adopt sustainable practices and develop circularity in their use of resources and products. At the same time, several events have contributed to a general sentiment of uncertainty and disruption in the business environment. These include the global financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, Brexit, trade and security policy tensions in US-China relations, the outbreak of Covid-19, and lately, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These events have made MNEs more vulnerable and exposed to supply disruptions, creating a need for greater resilience in their global value chains (GVCs) and operations.

Thus, we believe IB scholars must pay more attention to MNE behaviors and practices aimed at reducing our collective environmental footprint while simultaneously bolstering resilience to boost the societal impact of IB research (Aguilera et al., 2021; Doh et al., 2023). Within this context, sustainability and circular economy approaches are being considered in the policy making and practitioners’ world as alternatives to the current “take-make-use-dispose” production and consumption paradigms (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2015a and 2015b). This involves business models for the reuse, repair, and refurbishing of products, and for recycling of existing resources rather than turning them into waste. It implies that MNEs must take on extended responsibility for their products and services for the entire lifecycle of their products e.g., through take-back of the products. In parallel, there is a focus on reconfiguration of global value chains for resilience, i.e., the capability to anticipate, cope, recover from, and adapt to both periods of shocks and major disruptions. IB scholars have shown increasing interest in understanding possible connections between the two aspects of resilience and environmental sustainability, investigating the role of MNEs to achieve resilient sustainable development (e.g. Ghauri, 2022; van Zanten and van Tulder, 2018).

Yet, despite the critical and forward-looking nature of the resilience-and-sustainability discussion, previous research adheres fairly closely to traditional approaches to business analysis. Traditional approaches can be overly simplistic and linear, thereby failing to “explain complex phenomena and inform practice” (Aguilera et al., 2022; Seelos et al., 2022), and may also take a normative perspective on the dyadic relationship. Additionally, little is known as to what are the specific tensions, paradoxes, and trade-offs that MNEs need to address to achieve both sustainability and resilience (Carmine & De Marchi, 2023a; Di Stefano et al., 2023; Garrone et al., 2022; Kennedy & Linneluecke, 2022). Indeed, aiming to seriously embrace environmental sustainability, which often emphasizes a local view, might lead to new tensions for firms working across borders (Carmine & De Marchi, 2023b; Liou & Rao-Nicholson, 2021), creating a new form of complexity for international business (Casson & Li, 2022). In many ways sustainability and resilience go hand in hand, e.g., when making the GVCs more local (saving transportation costs) or by recycling products (creating alternative sources of raw materials). However, in some cases there might be tensions when aiming to be resilient and sustainable, as MNEs can build more resilient value chains at the expense of sustainability, e.g., resilience can be obtained by creating redundancies in the GVC which is inefficient from a resource perspective (Rajesh, 2021); or as being sustainable within a given local context can result into a reduction of resilience at the MNE level.

We believe, therefore, the time is right to push the multidisciplinary frontiers of this subject area by integrating IB scholarship more closely with research on sustainability, resilience, circularity, industrial ecology, as well as green and clean production (Folke et al., 2019). Our proposal is to explicitly recognize and account for the inherently global-systemic character of the processes of innovation to address the tensions within and between sustainability and resilience strategies (Williams et al., 2017; Schad and Bansal, 2018, van Tulder et al., 2021). While the presence of trade-offs between economic and environmentally sustainable goals is not a new aspect, there is much more to explore. Indeed, beyond the simple acknowledgment of different types of tensions, we aim to support research that provides novel insights into how to manage the tensions in connection with the environmental and resilience outcomes. At the most fundamental level, this requires a deepening of our understanding of the ways in which technological and institutional changes interact with MNE strategies, organizational design, and performance (Benito & Fehlner, 2022). In fact, technological, institutional, and organizational changes associated with sustainability and resilience require us to re-conceptualize the contemporary MNE as a nexus of co-evolving interdependencies, thus calling for further development of the established theories of the MNE and foreign direct investment. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the tensions that emerge when addressing the local-global interface is required, while considering for different levels of analysis; individuals – both top management and middle management; the organizational level, including the intra-MNE dynamics between and among subsidiaries and headquarter; the interorganizational level, accounting for local or global organizations and institutions; as well as the geographical level – from the subnational, national, regional, and global levels.

Aims and Scope of the Special Issue

The purpose of our proposed Special Issue is to explore how established IB approaches can be positively adapted, revised, or extended to offer new perspectives and insights on the nature, objectives, and essence of the MNE in light of the emerging imperatives of resilience and sustainability. Specifically, we argue that to improve our understanding of the interrelationships and co-evolution in the patterns of technological, organizational, and institutional changes in MNEs and international markets, we need to build on extant insights from adjacent social science fields such as political science, international relations, economic geography, operations management, economics and management of innovation, sustainability management and more distant fields such as ecology and energy studies. In so doing, we expect to promote a productive dialogue between the relevant domains and catalyze research on the roles, strategies, performance, and impact of contemporary MNEs dealing with the double imperative of resilience and sustainability.

We aim to attract a wide array of papers across methods and empirical settings, that are able to account for the vast heterogeneity in types of organizations (e.g., hybrid organizations and pure for profit MNEs); geographies (Global North and Global South) and size (large, established MNEs and smaller size startups). Extreme contexts, such as war zones and recovery or climate change disruptions are particularly welcomed, if they support enlightening the issues at stake. Possible topics that would be suitable for this SI include (but are not limited to):

• Management of sustainability and resilience tensions. Several tensions might emerge for a multinational engaging with the dual need to foster environmental sustainability and economic resilience (Carmine & De Marchi, 2023b; Di Stefano et al., 2023; Hahn et al., 2015). How can MNEs balance the quest for sustainability and resilience at the same time? What strategies are viable and what are the limits for MNEs to become better stewards of the natural environment and to create more resilient GVCs? What are the implications for these tensions on the possibility to mainstream sustainability within MNEs?
• Sustainability and resilience at the local-global nexus. MNEs aiming to reach sustainability goals need to account for the local nature of sustainability pressures and strategies with their global-systemic strategies. How can the global perspective of resilience in GVCs be balanced with sustainability efforts that often are more local in nature? Can MNEs apply the same sustainability strategy in all locations or will they have to adapt to local regulation and cultures? What implications for different institutional contexts in the development and applications of new practices that allows closing the loops?
• Resilience and sustainability as substituting or complementary goals. Some of the main mechanisms for obtaining resilience entail redundancy, flexibility and complexity reduction in the global value chain. This requires more resources and increased carbon footprint, which might come at the expense of sustainability goals. However, resilience and sustainability can also complement each other, e.g. by having more local production so the MNEs get less exposed to global disruptions. Similarly, when MNEs take responsibility for collecting their used products (take-back programs) and reuse existing components and material they will become less dependent on virgin resources. How can MNEs pursue the goal of resilience without compromising on sustainability and vice-versa? Which strategies can simultaneously optimize resilience and sustainability?
• Sustainable and circular innovations and (intra- and inter-firm) organizational challenges. Moving toward a circular model requires MNEs to substantially revisit their activities, even considering challenging decisions such as the phasing out of given business or the deep transformation of the operational activities and the implementation of new business models that practices that enable the reduction, sharing and recovery of materials and energy, collaborative consumption, and waste management (e.g., Kozlenkova et al., 2021; Benito & Fehlner, 2022; Buckley & Liesch, 2022). How to create new business models and platforms that decouple value creation and use of virgin resources yet maintaining resilience, accounting for the complexity of MNEs? What actors external to MNEs are needed to effectively develop and implement circularity by MNEs? What are the unintended and negative consequences of circular economy transitions, especially for MNEs’ ecosystems? What are the competitive implications for MNEs as they make the transition towards circularity, especially in the short to medium terms that are crucial for survival?
• Stakeholders pressure for sustainability and resilience. There is increasing pressure from stakeholders for MNEs to pursue the goals of sustainability and resilience. For example, institutions and regulations are pushing for more sustainability, customers want more sustainable products, and employees want to identify with a sustainable workplace. At the same time, there is increasing evidence of the importance for stakeholders pressures and MNE pressure to complement for the effective achievement of environmental outcomes, and of the challenges of such interaction (Gereffi & Lee, 2016; Liu et al., 2020; Nieri et al., 2023). What is the role of institutional pressures and regulations vs companies and individual actors’ responsibilities? How are stakeholders pushing the MNEs for sustainability and resilience? What other stakeholders – including NGOs, cooperatives, trade unions, industry associations, trade intermediaries – are impacting how firms develop strategies to reduce negative impacts and misbehaviors and being resilient?
• Solving methodological challenges in analyzing sustainability and resilience at the MNE level. A challenge for empirical studies is that neither data nor established metrics are readily available. Addressing sustainability and resilience requires researchers to address multi-faceted, complex problems, which span multiple levels and actors, and therefore poses challenges related to theorizing, framing, developing and conceptualizing from empirical analyses (Doh et al., 2021). Indeed, sustainability and resilience can be experienced quite differently at different points of a GVC (Krishnan et al., 2023) and across different subsidiaries. Furthermore, there is extensive evidence of MNEs experiencing both policy-practice decoupling and means-ends decoupling (Halme, et al., 2020, Ellimaki et al., 2023), which might undermine the possibility to effectively achieve the needed outcomes. How to account for the perspective of different actors, in different locations? What novel approaches can allow to more fully capture sustainability and resilience, and what are their limits? How to account for outcomes, rather than practices?

Deadline and Submission Instructions

Authors should submit their manuscripts between January 17, 2025, and January 31, 2025, via the Journal of International Business Studies submission system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jibs. To ensure that your submission is correctly identified for consideration for this Special Issue, please select “Special Issue: Resilience and Sustainability” from the Article Type list. Manuscripts should be prepared following the JIBS submission guidelines, available at https://www.palgrave.com/journal/41267/authors/submission.  

All submissions will go through the standard double-blind review process. The guest editors plan to host a online paper development workshop in 2025 for manuscripts that have advanced through the revision process. Such a workshop will allow authors to improve their manuscripts and enhance and sharpen the potential value of their contribution. It will also provide a community for scholars studying the topic. Participation in the workshop is neither a requirement nor a promise of final acceptance of the paper in the special issue. The guest editors also plan to organize panels at major conferences featuring some of the articles accepted for the special issue.

Questions about the Special Issue may be directed to the guest editors (please select copy all editors in your communication) and the JIBS Managing Editor ([log in to unmask]).

References

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About the Guest Editors

Gabriel R.G. Benito is Professor of strategy at BI Norwegian Business School,. His research agenda focuses on corporate governance, the strategies of multinational enterprises, and the economic organization of international business. He has published in a broad range of journals in business, management, and economics, including top journals such as Academy of Management Learning and Education, British Journal of Management, Global Strategy Journal, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of World Business. He is currently co-editor of Global Strategy Journal (since 2020) and consulting editor of Journal of International Business Studies (since 2008), and a member of the editorial boards of several other international top journals. He has extensive international experience in research, teaching, and academic community service. He was President of EIBA (European International Business Academy) in 2005 and has served in various roles in EIBA, and in the Academy of International Business (AIB) and Strategic Management Society (SMS). He organized the 2005 EIBA Conference and was co-chair of the 2018 SMS Special Conference in Oslo. He was elected Fellow of AIB in 2015, and Fellow of EIBA in 2017.

Valentina De Marchi is Associate Professor at ESADE Business School, Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability. Her research deals with processes of innovations aiming at reducing environmental impacts, especially in contexts of global value chains, when production is fragmented along geographically dispersed actors. As such, her research deals with the complexity to develop environmental innovations, investigating approaches through which firms can address this complexity. Her more recent research aims at understanding the role of paradoxical approaches to support achieving sustainability results, and the interplay of environmental upgrading and downgrading at different tiers of value chains. She published more than 60 refereed journal articles, published in journals such as Research Policy, Economic Geography, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Strategy & the Environment, International Journal of Production Economics, International Business Review, Journal of International Business Policy, Technological Forecasting and Social Change. She is incoming deputy editor of Journal of International Business Policy, and member of the editorial board of Organization & Environment and Journal of International Business Studies. She is the Italian representative at the European International Business Academy (EIBA), past president of the GRONEN association (2020-22), past co-organizer at Network O (Global Value Chains) within the SASE conference (2018-22).

Anthony Goerzen is the Sobey Professor of International Business at Smith School of Business of Queen’s University. Prior to academia, Anthony Goerzen spent fifteen years in management positions in both small firms and MNEs. His research interests relate to the behavior and performance of MNEs with a focus on location strategy, cooperative strategies (e.g., JVs, alliances, and networks) as well as social and environmental issue management within the context of global value chains. His research is published in Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management, Management International Review, Journal of International Management, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Peking University Business Review, Ivey Business Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives, and Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He has been Chair of AIB-Canada since 2017 and was elected Fellow of the Academy of International Business in 2023. He serves on numerous editorial boards including SMJ, GSJ, JIBS as well as currently Consulting Editor of JIBP.

Torben Pedersen is Professor of Global Strategy at Copenhagen Business School. His research interests is in the interface between strategy, sustainability and international management and he has published over 100 articles and books concerning the managerial and strategic aspects of globalization. His research has appeared in prominent journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Science. In addition, he has written more than 25 teaching cases published at case clearing houses. He was Vice-President for AIB (2008-2010) and Program chair in 2009 for the AIB-conference in San Diego. He was also Vice Chairman of EIBA from 2007-2010. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of International Business, Strategic Management Society and European International Business Association. He is founding editor of Global Strategy Journal and serves on numerous editorial boards. He has directed a number of research projects and is currently one of the leaders of the national research program, Manufacturing Academy of Denmark, focusing on promoting digitalization and sustainability in Danish companies. He is also one of the leaders on a European research project on the resilience in global value chains of European companies.

Lucia Piscitello is Professor of International Business and Economics at Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests cover the economics and management of MNEs, and the international aspects of technological change. Her recent studies focus on the reorganization of global productive and innovation processes, the co-evolution between digital technologies, innovation and skills, and the adoption of sustainable and circular economy principles within GVCs. She has served as Associate Editor of the Global Strategy Journal (2014-2023) and as Guest Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies (2016), the Journal of International Business & Policy (2020), Research Policy (2021), and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. She has published over 90 refereed journal articles. Her work has appeared in the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Global Strategy Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Geography, among others. She is Visiting Professor at the Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK, and she, acts as external expert for the Department of Geography & Environment, London School of Economics, UK. She is Fellow, Past President, and Chair of the European International Business Academy (EIBA), and Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB).