Strengthening sustainability in global supply chains requires producers, buyers, and nonprofit organizations to collaborate in transformative cross-sector partnerships (CSPs). However, the role played by nature in such partnerships has been left largely unattended in literature on CSPs. This article shows how strategizing nature helps CSPs reach their transformative potential. Strategizing nature entails the progressive revealing and reconciling of temporal tensions between “plants, profits, and people.” We show how a CSP took a parallel approach—recognizing the divergent temporalities of plants, people, and profits as interlaced and mutually determined—toward realizing their objective of implementing living wages in a sub-Saharan African country’s the tea industry, simultaneously driven by the revitalization of tea plantations. The promise of better quality tea leaves allowed partners to take a “leap of faith” and to tackle pressing issues before the market would follow. Our findings thus show the potential of CSPs in driving regenerative organizing.
DOCUMENT
Does Northern Europe possess unique characteristics that cannot disappear and do not need to disappear, or will globalisation inevitably result in uniformity, divested businesses, lower wages and huge pressure on social security provisions? This is one of the main questions addressed by the authors.The authors examine how companies respond to global developments. They also discuss the implications of these developments for entrepreneurs and whether knowledge institutions and governments play a part in creating a climate that is conducive to enterprise. They consider these issues from the perspective of different regions. Each region has its own distinct regional characteristics and its own distinct regional views on particular issues. As well as endeavouring to describe the key macroeconomic characteristics, they also consider how (entrepreneurial and policy-making) organisations should respond to the current macroeconomic challenges.
DOCUMENT
Cross-border commuting might be a way to improve an efficient allocation of labour resources, improve the economic performance of border regions and reduce economic and territorial inequality. This study explores the impact of a set of socio-economic, infrastructural or cultural explanatory variables that drive cross-border commuting in the EU and Switzerland for all outgoing commuters from living countries and for all incoming commuters towards their working countries. We find that cross-border commuters respond in general in the theoretically expected way to wages, unemployment, accessibility, language similarity and distance. But besides these general findings we also find that, in the end, cross-border commuting is a result of push and pull factors that seem to work out differently for different groups of commuters. This may reduce the inequality at the region level both between countries and within countries, although the effects are most likely small given the relatively small number of commuters. However, the results by gender, age, education and sector show substantial differences indicating that at the level of individuals and specific groups the reduction in inequalities might be very limited and may even increase.
LINK
