Sustainability and corporate social responsibility in internationally operating SMEs: Implications for performance

Abstract

Concepts relating to corporate sustainability (CS) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) have remained vastly under-explored in international entrepreneurship literature. The recent reviews by Jones et al. (2011) and Peiris et al. (2012) do not find a single study of CSR and indicate that sustainability is discussed in the traditional sense of the word in the literature (i.e. referring to the competitive advantage of companies), rather than as social responsibility and sustainability in a more holistic sense. The latter refers to the ‘triple-bottom line’, i.e. business that is sustainable from the point of view of the firm - profit, of the society - people, and of the environment and ecology - planet (see Elkington 1997). Moreover, in the Journal of International Entrepreneurship, only one paper (Kirkwood and Walton 2010) has during this decade considered the role of sustainability-related practices in international entrepreneurship. That study explored ecopreneurs in New Zealand through a case study, but we still do not have a clear view on whether it is worthwhile for internationalizing SMEs to invest their time and resources to develop socially responsible and sustainable business practices for foreign markets, as extant research on these topics in the context of international business overall tends to focus on large multinational enterprises (MNEs) rather than on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (Jamali et al. 2009).