This article contributes to the debate about the political role of the business firm. The article clarifies what is meant by the “political” role of the firm and how this political role relates to its economic role. To this end, the authors present an ordonomic concept of corporate citizenship and illustrate the concept by way of comparison with the Aristotelian idea of individual citizenship for the antique polis. According to our concept, companies take a political role if they participate in rule-setting processes and rule-finding discourses. Though this political role of the corporation is in principle ambivalent, the authors conclude that in such processes of “new governance” the economic and political roles of the firm need not contradict each other but can follow the same win-win logic of individual self-perfection through cooperative social interactions.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role for growth and sustainable development, particularly for rural areas in which MNCs are absent. Despite this link, there is little systematic research that investigates how SMEs address the particularities, opportunities, and challenges of rural areas based on their strengths and weaknesses. To fill this gap, this article uses a systematic literature review (SLR) that analyses 228 articles published between 2003 and October 2020. Our descriptive analysis shows that research on this topic has increased over time. Based on our thematic results, we juxtapose typical strengths and weaknesses of SMEs (enterprise perspective) and the opportunities and challenges of rural areas (spatial perspective). A key finding is that SMEs use relation-based collaboration as a meta-strategy to respond to these specific conditions. Wedding the theoretical perspectives of the RBV and transaction cost economics, we develop a conceptual model that explains why rural SMEs are in a particular need and position to use collaboration as a tool to innovate and access critical resources in otherwise resource-scarce rural areas. We then discuss how digitalization impacts our results regarding SMEs in rural space.

The purpose of this research is to consolidate and extend the current literature on employee outcomes of CSR (referred to as micro-level outcomes). The authors use a systematic review of the literature as a method to summarize and synthesise the different effects of CSR activities on employees based on 270 journal articles. The contribution of this paper is that it provides a comprehensive list of employee outcomes classified into different categories and a conceptual framework that maps desirable and undesirable outcomes of CSR activities on employees. The results show that various dimensions of CSR have different effects on employee outcomes. In addition, we explain mediators of CSR-employee outcomes relationships and moderators that could strengthen or weaken this relationship. The review reveals important gaps and offers a research agenda for the future. We have found only a few studies dealing with the negative impacts of CSR on employees as well as only a few studies that explain how different dimensions of CSR affect employees differently. The study has also practical implications for companies, as understanding different effects of CSR on employees helps organizations to design and implement CSR strategies and policies that foster employees’ positive attitudes and behaviours as well as prevent or reduce the negative effects, and hence create a business value and sustainable growth for the company.