The concept of the cultural landscape represents a liminal space where physical and digital geographies intersect, creating a dynamic terrain where consumers, brands, and the landscape itself interact to create meaning and establish value. This introduction highlights the intricate relationship between brands and consumers within this landscape, exploring the fluid exchange of power and identity construction that occurs in these interactions. With a focus on how brands and consumers co-create meaning and value, the book examines the formation and exchange of capital, gender, authenticity, activism, and the power dynamics that come into play between consumers and brands.

Chapter One reviews the history of foreign direct investment in less developed world regions and less developed countries and considers the empirical evidence about its effects on economic development. It critically evaluates main theoretical and conceptual perspectives on the effects of foreign direct investment in less developed countries. I argue two main points. First, the empirical evidence points strongly towards very uneven and limited positive long-term development effects of foreign direct investment in less developed countries. Second, mainstream and heterodox approaches to foreign direct investment came to contrasting conclusions about its potential long-term development effects in less developed countries.

This chapter introduces the economic perspective on sweatshops and some alternatives available to workers. It explains the ethical standard – the welfare of Third World sweatshop workers and other poor people in the countries where sweatshops are located – that will be used throughout the book, and it provides an overview of what will be covered in the coming chapters.

While there have always been high levels of philanthropic giving in the Global South, the urgency and unexpectedness of COVID-19 transformed the parameters within which philanthropy operates. Reimagining Philanthropy in the Global South examines how newer models of philanthropy are tackling development challenges, including poverty, inequality, and access to health care and education, and questions how organisations are coping with structural changes in donor-driven philanthropy; how changes in traditional grant-making are impacting the imperatives of recipient organisations; and how indigenous philanthropy is making a difference. The chapters provide frank assessments of the priorities, challenges, and opportunities of emerging market philanthropy, and the lessons learned from the pandemic. The authors highlight the deeper issues at play, as well as offering ideas and positive examples of how diverse stakeholders are coming together to solve social challenges in creative and practical ways. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

That a commercial contract is international may seem intuitive to some observers, yet it is difficult to find an accepted definition for the term. What is even more difficult is identifying the legal rules to which international commercial contracts are subject. Are international contracts subject to some sort of international law? What are the sources of this law and what is its scope of application? To the extent that international contracts are subject to national rules, which law’s rules are applicable? These questions become even more pressing when the practice of international contracting is taken into consideration: contracts are often written as if their terms were the only source with which to regulate the parties’ relationship and as if any sources of law were irrelevant.

Two shifts are transforming television: digitisation and globalisation. Internet-based video delivery, the uptake of cloud computing in the industry, mobile video consumption, and the rise of streaming platforms, are all phenomena connected to the process of digitisation. Internet protocol (IP)–based video transport is powering the transition from broadcasting to streaming, thereby changing the way content is distributed and accessed. The use of cloud computing is growing fast because it delivers an unprecedented amount of computing power and capacity to media firms at a fraction of the infrastructure costs (Chapters 3, 4, and 8). Video is increasingly accessed via mobile devices, and streaming is among the most popular activities for mobile users (Chapter 6). The digital shift is evolving business models. Platforms dominate television’s streaming age the way networks prevailed in the broadcasting era (Chapters 3 and 4). Media conglomerates are edging towards a direct-to-consumer (DCT) business model, revolutionising the way content rights are distributed and monetised (Chapters 3 and 9).

This introductory chapter discusses the nature of explanation. It first distinguishes between the epistemic versus ontic conceptions of explanation; the former deems that explanations explain by subsuming a phenomenon under a general proposition while the latter regards explanations as physical entities residing and participating in the causal structure of the world. Using the example of entrepreneurial opportunities, the chapter describes how an ontological position plays a role in shaping an explanation. Explanation promotes understanding. However, tautological explanations, such as Barney’s (1991) explanation of competitive advantage based on firm resources, do not increase our understanding of the phenomenon in question. Then the chapter discusses the contrastive approach to explanation, showing that an explanation is necessarily incomplete. The discussion is followed by examining whether causal explanations have to be general and whether good explanations have to be interesting. The chapter ends with a brief description of the subsequent chapters of the book.

Over the past two decades, globalization, technology disruption, the 2008 financial crisis, activist shareholders and more recently, climate change, Covid-19 and new geopolitical risks have unleashed several earthquakes with deep and lasting effects on the business world and society. For most of the twentieth century, companies were institutions that helped create wealth, innovation and jobs, and raised the standards of living for many people. In a stable international context, firms played a key role in spreading economic growth and prosperity around the world. Unfortunately, the rising uncertainty unleashed by those trends has made the role of boards of directors in governing companies extremely complex.

This chapter provides historical background on Asia, amid talks of an Asian twenty-first century. We show that Asia’s resurgence has been based on models that differ substantively from those of capitalist development in Europe and North America, not least through the heavy reliance on the state. Further, they have had many common features, not least being centred on the pervasive use of connections – familial, commercial and political. We term these networks as the connections world. Whilst this world has been supportive to growth and development, it contains major fallibilities. These include cronyism and its consequences – high inequality and corruption. In addition, the connections world breeds market power which impairs efficiency and innovation. The resulting structure of the economy also holds back the creation of good jobs. Much of the connections world is also associated with autocracy or heavily managed democracies and this introduces risks of instability. As such, the broad model that has helped Asia grow so strongly is less likely to be so supportive in future. Rethinking the connections world will be required – not an easy task given strongly embedded and resilient foundations.

Beyond macroeconomic indicators and simple observations that China, India, and Russia are large and diverse developing countries shedding socialist economies, what is often overlooked is that these countries’ development trajectories are nationally distinct and sectorally variegated. The commonality of market liberalization in the context of their global economic integration has translated into very different pathways to development, revealing stark differences in micro-institutional foundations, which vary by sector. This book unravels the puzzles with three overarching claims. First, mediating the impacts of globalization and economic liberalization on industrialization are dominant nation-specific sectoral patterns of market governance. Market governance structures comprise two dimensions (level and scope of the state in market coordination and dominant distribution of property rights arrangements). The conceptualization recognizes the various state authorities and market actors in coordination mechanisms and broadens measures of institutional quality beyond de jure private property rights and credible commitment. Second, the values and identities of national political economic elites as they respond to objective political and economic pressures internal and external in nature interact with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The resultant national configurations of sectoral models, the third claim of the book, negotiate global economic integration with impacts on actual development outcomes.

Chapter 1 immerses the reader into the Za'atari refugee camp. Situated in Jordan just seven and a half miles south of the Syrian border, the camp – a two-square-mile rectangle divided into twelve districts – is nestled in the very heart of the Middle East. Here, in the desert heat, a community was born in the swell of crisis. The reader is immediately introduced to the book's three featured Syrian women entrepreneurs – Yasmina, Asma, and Malak – in their elements. Yasmina, a salon and wedding dress shop owner, is relaxing in the salon with her family as her client celebrates a beautiful wedding a couple of districts away. Asma, a social entrepreneur and teacher, is reading a story to a group of children – including three of her own – in her trailer, which she has converted into a magical hideout for the children. Malak, an artist, is putting the finishing touches on a series of drawings for an event at a youth center that is meant to encourage the girls in Za'atari to push against the harmful practice of child marriage.

This chapter introduces the question of why capitalist development in Colombia has resulted in contradictory outcomes, including endemic political violence and labor repression that exist alongside regular elections, stable economic growth, and deeply entrenched political conservativism across large segments of the country’s working class. To understand these contradictions, it reconceptualizes them as labor regime dynamics that vary significantly across three global commodity-producing regions (coffee, bananas, coca) and across developmental periods of time (pre-developmentalist, developmentalist, neoliberal). It then lays out the conceptual framework and methodological approach of the book, which draws from and extends insights from labor regimes, global commodity chains, world hegemonies, and comparative and world historical sociology. Finally, it provides an overview of the structure of the book and its main findings.

In 1976, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong died, providing an opportunity for China to change his revolutionary course that led the country to ruin. In the late 1970s, the CCP changed course and began to open China to investment and trade. The democratic countries welcomed the change and engaged with China, hoping that economic development would lead to democratization. Forty years later, the Chinese economy has become the largest in the world, but democracy and the rule of law are still missing. This chapter provides an overview of the book. The author argues that, wielding its absolute and total control, the CCP has made the entire country into a giant corporation. China, Inc. has the agility of a corporation and the resources of a country, making it extremely competitive globally. However, China, Inc. also has its built-in contradiction: its need to close China from the democracies’ influence, and its reliance on the world’s openness to thrive. Based on the China, Inc. perspective, the author makes policy and strategic suggestions for the democracies and multinational corporations dealing with China.

Human societies have always needed safety nets to catch those who end up in need. The risks have always been there. Only recently has there been a global surge in government social spending. The major historical issues raised by this long delay are introduced in this chapter. Readers are given spoiler alerts about whether it had to be government that spread the nets, and about whether large-spending countries got the mix of social spending wrong more often than did low-spending governments. The conventional arguments for and against tax-based social spending are introduced.

At the turn of the millennium, emerging markets (EMs) bent the arc of the global economy. China, India, Latin America, and Africa witnessed over a decade of growth, increased foreign direct investments (FDIs), and pro-market reforms. These shifts gave cause and effect for the expansion of consumer markets and the accumulation of wealth.

The middle of the pyramid, i.e., the middle-income classes, in emerging countries are increasingly becoming a large consumer market but one that is little understood. This increasingly growing middle-of-the-pyramid group is the result of the recent economic progress of many emerging economies. Individuals who until recently were very poor, and commonly ignored as consumers by most companies, are no longer so. They have become entrepreneurs or are employed in jobs that provide them with higher and more stable income. As a result, their consumption patterns have shifted, becoming an attractive but underserved and in most cases misunderstood market.

A radically new understanding of the ethics of business enterprises, or “corporate responsibility,” in the global context is offered that combines wealth creation in a comprehensive sense with the respect for human rights by strengthening the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The chapter provides an introduction to this new understanding and an overview of the following chapters. After delineating the global context with globalization, sustainability and financialization, Part One explicates the seven features of wealth creation: the substantive contents of natural, economic, human and social capital; public and private wealth; the productive and distributive dimensions of the process of creating wealth; material and spiritual aspects; sustainability in terms of human capabilities; creating as making something new and better; and self- and other-regarding motivations. Part Two conceives human rights as public goods in wealth creation; it accounts for all 30 internationally recognized human rights based on the UN Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, defines them as minimal ethical requirements needed in the global and pluralistic context and offers cost-benefit considerations about human rights. Part Three develops the implications of Part One and Two for the conception of “corporate responsibility.”

There is a growing recognition that African firms are innovating and these innovations are important to African economies. This chapter provides a general introduction to the book by introducing the broad objectives, the research design and methods as well as the research questions tackled in each of the subsequent chapters of the book. In addition, the chapter presents the structure of the book and summarizes the major findings in each chapter.

This chapter introduces background information and recent trends in expatriation. It begins by briefly reviewing the early literature on expatriation, from the 1960s to the late-1980s. It then describes changes that occurred in the 1990s that transformed radically the area of global mobility. Finally, the chapter outlines key trends in global mobility that define the landscape of the topic today. The chapter concludes by summarising the contents and key contributions that the reader will find in each chapter of this book.

This chapter introduces the background and key research question of the project for this book, which is an output of a multi-country study on a highly important subject in emerging markets: what types of capabilities do emerging market firms need, and how do they acquire and upgrade these capabilities in order to achieve competitiveness in the global market? The chapter highlights two unique aspects of emerging markets: weak institutions and lack of endowment. The main theme of the book thus becomes how emerging market companies develop competitive capabilities to international levels facing these two critical constraints. The chapter also discusses the organization of the book, which comprises twelve different country studies, and presents the methodology used to select and evaluate the firms studied.