Managing the Unavoidable: New Avenues for Research on MNEs and Societal Crises

Multinational enterprises play ever more prominent roles in societal crises, including armed conflict and humanitarian emergencies. In this chapter, Verena Girschik (CBS MSC) and Jasper Hotho (CBS EGB) contribute to a revitalization of the IB research agenda on societal crises through the identification of new, ambitious, and socially relevant lines of research.

Girschik and Hotho review key achievements in IB research on conflict and crisis, and critically revisits the theoretical assumptions behind extant research. With the help of several examples, including the Mediterranean migration crisis and the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, they illustrate the increasingly active and diverse role of multinational enterprises in efforts to combat societal crises and underline the need for new theoretical paradigms and empirical methods to capture the complex interplay between IB activity and crises. The authors conclude with several theoretical and methodological recommendations for next-generation IB research in this important area.

The chapter is included in ‘A Research Agenda for International Business and Management’, an agenda-setting volume edited by Ödül Bozkurt and Mike Geppert that is published by Edward Elgar Publishing. Depending on permissions, the chapter can be accessed here.