While China has experienced an unprecedented growth over the past decades, sustainability has become a major concern for policymakers and management practitioners. Consideration has been given to the convergence of mass entrepreneurship and innovation as a new economic driver and sustainability as a long-term economic objective. The focus of China’s economic development has moved from a resource-based expansion to a more entrepreneurial and socially responsible one. This is a timely and critical topic that captures the increasing concerns over sustainability and (...) Chinese firms’ increased responsibility under the new governmental initiatives in fulfilling their social mandates from stakeholders at different levels. It is also a rich area for academic research but still under studied in the Chinese context. More indigenous management research on corporate social responsibility is required to adopt Chinese perspectives in conceptualizing CSR-related problems and further formulating more contextualized CSR theories, the emergence of a new research horizon. (shrink)

This study adopts a narrative lens to investigate how place shapes the emergence and work of cross-sector partnerships (CSPs). Based on a qualitative inquiry of the marketization of Lapland, Finland, as the home of Santa Claus, four matters of concern around the ethicality of marketizing Lapland are followed: revitalization, commerciality, distortion, and imbalance. The findings show how CSPs emerge in the marketization of place through the mechanisms of narrative contestations and misalignment of marketized place and place-identity, and their (re)alignment at (...) the nexus of marketization. The contestations and misalignment generate matters of concern from place, which in turn mobilize CSPs via two interrelated narrative practices: (i) problematizing and (ii) reimagining the marketized place to realign it with place-identity. The paper contributes the construct of concerned partnerships to the literature of CSPs, a place-based form of CSPs which consist of both market and non-market actors, including the place and its social and material resources. They are formed through matters of concern that emerge through misalignments of marketized place and place-identity, to realign them and sustain a place at a nexus of marketization. (shrink)

The role to be played by multi-stakeholder partnerships in addressing the ‘wicked problems’ of sustainable development is made explicit by the seventeenth Sustainable Development Goal. But how do these partnerships really work? Based on the analysis of four sustainability-oriented innovation initiatives implemented in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and France, this study explores the roles and mechanisms that collaborating actors may enact to facilitate the pursuit of sustainable development, with a particular focus on non-profit organizations. The results suggest that collaborative innovations for (...) sustainability contribute simultaneously to the fulfilment of different Sustainable Development Goals, reaching beyond their original intent, and that the value being created has the potential to reinforce such roles and mechanisms. These partnerships are prompted and managed by non-profit organizations that act as metagovernors of collaborative innovation processes as they play the roles of cultural spreaders, enablers, relational brokers, service provides, and influencers. These findings will help policy-makers and practitioners in the public and non-profit sector to identify and utilize emerging opportunities for value creation through collaborative innovation, and to better design existing and prospective collaborative efforts aimed at sustainable objectives, thereby supporting progress towards the implementation of Agenda 2030. (shrink)

Although some scholars propagate cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) as a panacea for addressing the grand challenges of the 21st century, scholars also acknowledge that this type of collaboration faces significant barriers since the institutional logics of partners such as business, civil society, and government potentially have contradicting interests and future visions. This inductive longitudinal case study on integrating skilled migrants into the German labor market examines the institutional work by which CSP members, particularly government actors, deliberately rein in contradictory logics to (...) reproduce the dominant government logic, and in doing so, establish a high level of institutional coherence. In disclosing the processes by which the dominant logic maintains its hegemony, I contribute new insight into the institutional dynamics within government-sponsored CSPs. I identify various actions and I illuminate CSP tensions and dark sides. (shrink)