Ans Kolk

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Amsterdam Business School

Full text available open access at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090951615000632. This article examines how the international business (IB) literature has addressed social responsibility issues in the past 50 years, highlighting key developments and implications from a historical perspective. Specific attention is paid to the...

Literature on partnerships has grown rapidly in the past decade across different disciplines. However, despite conceptual attention to the value of strategic multi-stakeholder collaboration to promote peace and reconciliation, challenges posed by (post-)conflict, fragile contexts have barely been considered in empirical studies. In this article we...

Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) can play an important role in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article examines ‘what we know’ about their participation in implementing the SDGs and their impact, both positive and negative, on People, Planet, Prosperity and Peace as identified in the United Nations (UN) 2030 Age...

Despite a strong plea for integrating sustainability goals into traditional corporate bonus schemes, a comprehensive implementation of these systems has been lacking until recently. This article explores four illustrative cases from the Netherlands, where several multinationals started to pioneer with sustainable bonuses in the past few years. The...

In 1998-1999, Prahalad and colleagues introduced the Base/Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) concept in an article and a working paper. This article’s goal is to answer the question: What has become of the concept over the decade following its first systematic exposition in 1999? To answer this question, the authors conducted a systematic review of articl...

A flurry of regulations has emerged across the world to govern the use, transfer and storage of data, affecting digital and traditional firms, of all sizes. To guide business practitioners and educators, this article provides insights into key components of digital laws and what they mean for different types of firms. We take the European Union as...

While multinational enterprises (MNEs) are widely recognized for providing employment to a significant number of women around the globe, empirical evidence suggests that existing gender inequalities may be aggravated rather than alleviated in their subsidiaries. We build on gender theory to better understand how gender is construed and enacted diff...

This paper offers a business perspective on the EU data governance framework, particularly related to data sharing in the financial sector. With policy-making (“on the books”) centred on guaranteeing data privacy and data security whilst promoting innovation, firms face complexities when implementing this framework “on the ground”. We build on exis...

In an era of digital transformation, where data is often referred to as the ‘new oil’ of business, with data privacy and cybersecurity incidents recurrently making the headlines, international business (IB) scholars are increasingly grappling with the challenges posed by disparate data governance regulations. Recognizing the growing importance of t...

Building on emerging debates on the ‘dark’ and ‘bright’ side of digital globalization, and calls for considering its environmental and social implications in more detail, this perspective article seeks to ‘unravel’ these components of ‘the digital age’ for International Business (IB). Inspired by the affordance perspective developed in Information...

Communities around the world face increasing risks of climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and droughts. What drives firms’ heterogeneous responses to a climate disaster, and what could be the consequences for community resilience? To address these questions, we theorize how different aspects of sensemaking (sense of place, time, certitude...

Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have increasingly paid attention to sustainable business models (SBM). How to upscale SBMs is a key question in transition research, but current research has rarely adopted a firm-level perspective to discuss the scaling strategies that initiators of SBMs can use. Collaboration with other actors is o...

This chapter explores whether and how an important environmental issue such as climate change can not only give multinational enterprises the opportunity to develop “green” firm-specific advantages (FSAs), but also help reconfigure key FSAs that are viewed as the main sources of firms’ profitability, growth, and survival. We examine the nature and...

This article explores possible ways in which Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) contribute to eradicating child labour in the lower tiers of their supply chains. After highlighting key insights from academic literature and policymaking on definitions and approaches, we examine several innovative multi-stakeholder partnerships —from the coffee, cocoa,...

Purpose-Amidst burgeoning attention for global value chains (GVCs) in international business (IB), this paper aims to identify a clear "missing link" in this literature and discusses implications for research and corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy-making and implementation. Design/methodology/approach-The paper combines an overview of r...

This editorial introduces ten research articles, which form part of this special issue, exploring the governance of "European values" inside data flows. Protecting fundamental human rights and critical public interests that undergird European societies in a global digital ecosystem poses complex challenges, especially because the United States and...

This article ties in directly with recently intensified interest in business models in international business (IB), using the energy transition as empirical context to explore their relevance in firm internationalization. The global energy transition presents a challenge for almost all industries, but some face specific difficulties particularly im...

Triggered by budgetary challenges and growing awareness of social needs, recent years have seen increasing entrepreneurial behaviour in the nonprofit sector, of which collaboration with for-profit organizations is a case in point. Yet, while extant research has extensively studied the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of for-profit organizations, sc...

This chapter provides a commentary on the article “A perspective on multinational enterprises and climate change. Learning from an 'inconvenient truth'?”, published in Journal of International Business Studies (Kolk & Pinkse, 2008), with the purpose of updating the article’s contribution, in view of the state of the art in both the international bu...

This article is available open access at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-019-04160-5 In recent years, researchers and practitioners have increasingly paid attention to food waste, which is seen as highly unethical given its negative environmental and societal implications. Waste recovery is dependent on the creation of connections...

Urban waste management is one of the most complex and urgent challenges that the society faces. In this paper, an innovative research methodology is proposed, introducing a systemic approach to circular waste management strategy‐making. Urban waste management is a complex system that needs to be tackled in a holistic, yet context‐specific manner. T...

The growing interest in global value chains (GVCs) has been paired with a greater appreciation of the need for better measurement methods, as reflected by recent initiatives from academia and leading international organizations. This research note focuses on one method to measure GVCs that has been recommended in recent scholarly work, namely input...

This article points at insights from the subfields of international business and strategic management that are relevant for sustainability transitions research. Specifically, building on the emergent ‘mainstream’ literature on ‘generic’ digital platforms, we explain how a range of digital platform multinationals has emerged which address sustainabi...

Given that entire industries face sustainability challenges, it is important to understand the dynamics that lead “firms‐in‐an‐industry” to engage in sustainable product innovation. To provide more insight into the question of how innovation activities spread from individual firm action to an industry‐wide engagement, this paper examines the automo...

Whereas IB has extensively studied MNEs’ generic (positive) impact on host economies, but rarely on employee wages, economics research has only shown an overall MNE wage premium. We ‘unravel’ this premium, considering multiple levels of analysis and accounting for host-country contextual contingencies, to unveil MNEs different (positive or negative...

Full text available at https://doi.org/10.1108/MBR-08-2019-0083 Purpose This paper aims to examine the multiplicity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards, explaining its nature, dynamics and implications for multinational enterprises (MNEs) and international business (IB), especially in the context of CSR and global value chain (GVC)...

The growth of peer‐to‐peer sharing is crucially dependent on continued participation of current platform members and on them behaving prosocially towards other participants who are usually strangers. We propose a relational‐models view that revolves around the idea that how members perceive the relationships among participants on a sharing platform...

https://www.folia.nl/wetenschap/130337/hoe-digitale-technologie-kan-helpen-om-voedselverspilling-te-verminderen

Available at http://www.nieuwsbriefmilieueneconomie.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=722&Itemid=999

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/does-it-pay-for-cities-to-be-green

Full text available open access at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.12.295 In addition to fostering the rise of new players in various sectors, the sharing economy has attracted the attention of established companies, the so-called ‘incumbents’. Some incumbents have joined the sharing economy to both reap its emerging opportunities and tackl...

Full text available open access at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42214-018-00017-2 Recent years have seen growing interest in a leading role for cities in addressing major environmental sustainability challenges including cleaner air and water. While geographers have long studied urban governance responses, international business (IB)...

As part of the growing interest in cities to address persistent sustainability issues in society, ‘smart cities’ have increasingly become an ubiquitous phenomenon globally. For multinational enterprises (MNEs), this has provided opportunities to develop and market technological innovations to facilitate the creation of smart cities, given that the...

This article is available full-text on https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fs42214-018-0004-1.pdf The article examines the role of multinationals and international business in poverty alleviation, based on an analysis of articles in the top journals in business, economics, and policy. We develop a conceptual cross-disciplinary framework...

The published version of this article is available open access at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bsd2.5/full While literature on companies’ contributions to local development exists, little is known about the specific dilemmas encountered on the ground when operating under adverse conditions, and how transparency can be improved. Comp...

Full text available open access at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090951617304388 While studies on international corporate social responsibility (CSR) have expanded significantly, their true global nature can be questioned. We systematically review 494 articles in 31 journals over a 31-year period. We assess the embeddedness of...

Full text available open access at http://bas.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/05/0007650316629129.full.pdf+html Aiming at a better understanding of the extent to which Africa-focused research has helped develop context-bound, context-specific, and context-free knowledge, the authors present the findings from a literature review of journal artic...

Full text available open access at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-015-2897-5 This paper explores the role of ideology in attempts to influence public policy and in business representation in the EU-China solar panel anti-dumping dispute. It exposes the dynamics of international activity by emerging-economy multinationals, in thi...

Sustainability has attracted increasing attention from business scholars as corporations have started to take more responsibility for their environmental, social, and development impacts. In this review, we focus on the latest sustainability-related research published in the international business and management (IM) field and explore the links wit...

Despite growing interest in business for peace, there is little insight into how the organizations involved combine societal aims with economic ones in their business models. Literature has exemplified ‘hybrid organizations’ that seek to pursue both for-profit and non-profit activities and are specifically set up with this mission, usually in stabl...

This paper presents an evaluation of the impact of the related EU internal energy market and renewable energy policies by exploring the (sustainable) energy transition in the EUropean electricity sector and drawing on the emerging literatures on energy geographies. We use evidence aggregated from plant-level data on installed electricity generation...

In recent times social entrepreneurship has proliferated globally, yet research into the phenomenon still lags behind its practice, particularly in the developing world, and especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this blog post, we discuss what we know, what we don’t, and what we can learn from studying social entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa....

Low-emission vehicle (LEV) technologies have grown in the 1990s, but have since experienced fluctuating interest. Initially, electric vehicles (EVs) were the most promising technology. Most large car firms developed EVs and started bringing them to the market, in limited numbers. Yet, car firms halted their EV engagement around 2001 and focused on...

Despite large interest in CSR in China, the role of consumers has been underexplored in empirical research, with studies mainly focused on specific subcomponents of CSR, based on evidence from small, urban samples. Using a country-wide consumer survey, this article examines 1) how Chinese consumers perceive CSR and its components; 2) whether their...

The authors aim to contribute to the literature on subsistence marketplaces and the marketing field more generally by exploring social innovation partnerships in a fragile country characterized by institutional gaps, specifically considering the role of cross-sector collaboration in conflict-affected areas. The empirical setting consists of coffee...

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 for MNEs, based on the notion that MNEs face considerable variat...

Full text available open access at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-015-2727-9 The growing body of literature on partnerships has paid most attention to their implications at the macro level, for society, as well as the meso level, for the partnering organisations. While generating many valuable insights, what has remained underex...

This article explores how the institutional context, including central and local governments, has co-evolved with business in relation to small cars and sustainability. This is a very relevant issue for business and society in view of the environmental implications of the rapidly growing vehicle fleet in China, the economic importance attached to t...

Responding to calls for a better understanding of the relationship between social enterprises and their environments, this article focuses on contextual influences on social entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify four predominantly African contextual dimensions, i.e., acute poverty, informality, colonial history, and ethnic group ident...

The article provides an historical overview of the accounting practices related to the social and environmental aspects of business. Recent trajectories of corporate reporting in multinationals are highlighted, with an emphasis on different sector dynamics and regulatory contexts. The current wave of reporting seems not to have ended, with environm...

While research has generated useful very insights, usually at the macro level, regarding the multi-faceted nature of environmental innovation and regulation, the characteristics and drivers peculiar to international companies have remained underexposed in the policy-related literature on clean technology transfer and development. This article aims...

In conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of Journal of World Business, a special issue will be published in late 2015/early 2016. This issue will include contributions from some of the leading scholars – both established and emerging – in international management research. In this panel, 4 of these individuals – representing each of four areas of t...

This paper examines the challenge posed by the MNE to institutional theory by exploring how multinational institutional embeddedness affects MNEs’ responses to deinstitutionalization after a disruptive event. It focuses on the institutional work by national governments and major European nuclear energy firms in the German, French and UK organizatio...

The research insights and challenges that a leading partnership academic, Ans Kolk, was invited to share in the new ‘Thought Gallery’ Section, articulate research challenges, usually eliminated in journal publications. In addition, Kolk unpacks the power of individual interactions in the ‘Trickle Effects’ article and explains the potential of incre...

While most research on business-nonprofit partnerships has focused on macro and meso perspectives, this paper pays attention to the micro level. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives from both marketing and management, we conceptually relate the outcomes of active employee participation in such partnerships to consumer self-interest. We also...

This article aims to improve the understanding of how micro-level subsistence activities might be related to higher-level phenomena to increase well-being of individuals and communities in contexts characterized by institutional gaps. Using coffee as illustrative case, it explores the link between local entrepreneurial activities in developing coun...

Sustainable technologies challenge prevailing business practices, especially in industries that depend heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Firms are therefore in need of business models that transform the specific characteristics of sustainable technologies into new ways to create economic value and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of th...

In the automotive industry the need to move towards more sustainable trajectories of innovation has received much attention. Car manufacturers have started to develop loweremission alternatives for the internal combustion engine, particularly electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles. They face the challenge, however, of how to make a potentially dis...

As part of the debate about globalization and regionalization, this paper adds a perspective that has so far remained underexposed, that of (formerly state-owned) firms in (previously) regulated industries, in order to better understand the (changing) role of the home country/region in internationalization processes in the context of regional marke...

This chapter examines partnerships and their peculiarities, based on recent research from various disciplines, in the context of the large problems faced by global society. These problems are very complex, usually cross national boundaries, and cannot easily be ‘solved’ by one single actor. Previous ‘unilateral’ attempts to address them have not be...

To contribute to the debate on the role of social media in responsible business, this article explores blogger buzz in reaction to food companies’ press releases on health and obesity issues, considering the content and the level of fit between the CSR initiatives and the company. Findings show that companies issued more product-related initiatives...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore consumers' responses to social alliances, a specific type of corporate social marketing in which companies cooperate with non-profit organizations. This paper extends previous studies that suggested that a social marketing effort may be a “double-edged sword” with regard to companies' marketing obje...

This overview article examines the various dimensions of sustainable coffee as well as the actors involved and their perceptions of how to advance the market from niche to mainstream. The issues at hand are very complex, with different types of coffee producers, manufacturing/roasting companies and consumers, and a variety of standards, all with th...

Purpose – The domestic institutional context has emerged as a key determinant of firms’ environmental disclosure, but studies have hardly addressed the extent to which exposure to foreign institutional contexts plays a role in the occurrence and contents of non-financial disclosure, crucial aspects for understanding multinationals’ accountability....

Attention has increased for the potential role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in helping address conflict issues and/or furthering peace and reconciliation as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. However, while existing literature emphasises the importance for MNEs to collaborate with various stakeholders, including no...

The paper analyzes the impact of institutions on the structure of partnerships in subsistence markets (SMs). Grounded in institutional theory and transaction cost economics, the reasoning suggests that partnerships will adapt to the co-existence of SM-specific and external institutions in SMs. SM partnerships will include multiple partners from mul...

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 sustainability reports. We specifically investigate how...

Confronted with public concerns about health and obesity, food companies are taking several measures. However, it is unclear to what extent they should communicate these policies. This article explores reactions in the blogosphere to health-related announcements by large food companies. Results show that taste-related announcements generate not onl...

Purpose – Although the crucial role of business, and of business-based approaches, in development is increasingly emphasised by academics and practitioners, we lack insight into the ‘whether and how’ of viable business models, in environmental, social and economical terms. This article analyses private-sector involvement in development, including a...

Although business–NGO (nongovernmental organizations) partnerships have received much attention in recent years, insights have been obtained only 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 problems given the abse...

With this paper we present an analysis of sixty transnational governance initiatives and assess the implications for our understanding of the roles of public and private actors, the legitimacy of governance ‘beyond’ the state, and the North–South dimensions of governing climate change. In the first part of the paper we examine the notion of transna...

This chapter examines partnerships and their peculiarities, based on recent research from various disciplines, in the context of the large problems faced by (global) society. These problems are very complex, often cross national boundaries, and cannot easily be 'solved' by one single actor. Previous 'unilateral' attempts to address them have not be...

The 17th COP to the UNFCCC met in Durban in November 2011. Carbon Management has invited a panel of experts to express their views on the talks. The experts speak to Lucy Marum, Assistant Commissioning Editor, as they speculate on the implications for industry and policy, and discuss how these may impact approaches to GHG management in the future.