The post-war period saw the rise of the multinational enterprise (MNE). This new phenomenon drew increasing attention from academia, trade unions, governments and the wider public, often evoking fears about seemingly powerful businesses operating across countries and beyond control. Against the background of these impressions and more general crises (e.g., oil shock, inflation and rising unemployment), international organisations like the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched comprehensive inquiries to grasp the nature of the new phenomenon. The ensuing reports concluded that MNEs were neither good nor bad per se but constituted a dilemma. They could be instrumental in promoting economic and social development, while at the same time they could abuse their powers in fields such as taxation, employment and their relations to foreign governments. The UN reports recommended the creation of a code of conduct which would stress the positive role and put a check on corporate misbehaviour. The UN was the first to pursue such a code but was soon torn between the diverging views of developed and developing countries. The OECD, which at the beginning of the debate had been reluctant towards a code, stepped in and adopted the 1976 Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the first code of conduct to emerge. The Guidelines were the result of an internal trade-off: minimum ethical standards for MNEs in turn for investment-friendly government responsibilities. The UN negotiations, by contrast, dragged on and were abandoned by the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the MNE dilemma and the code debate established or "codified" the very idea that MNEs had moral responsibilities vis-à-vis government and society. This idea has survived until the late 1990s and 2000s when another wave of international standards of corporate conduct-now called corporate social responsibility (CSR)-emerged.

This paper examines entrepreneurship in its relationship to criticalness. Though conceding that ‘critical' is a slippery term without a singular meaning, we contend that an explicitly critical agenda of entrepreneurship is needed to decenter the commonsense which notoriously prevents us from understanding entrepreneurship outside of the ‘hegemony of the positive' (Bill, Olaison & Sorensen, forthcoming). Critical is hence used here as a sensitizing concept to emphasize entrepreneurship's assumed role in overcoming extant relations of exploitation, domination and oppression. So far, critical approaches have been instrumental for creating insights into how entrepreneurship is connected with, for instance, the favoring of sectional interests, the ideological support of capitalist hegemony or the selective appropriation of profits. However, whilst this ‘dark side' approach has gained some currency in entrepreneurship studies (Spicer, 2012), it is our conviction that critical analyses must also comprise a commitment to how entrepreneurship can bring about new openings for liberating forms of individual and collective existence. Consequently, following the example of Rindova, Barry and Ketchen's (2009) special issue on ‘Entrepreneuring as Emancipation', we sketch out a critical agenda of entrepreneurship research based on different conceptualizations of emancipation. Concretely, drawing on Laclau's (1996) dualism of emancipation - oppression, we chart four forms of emancipation, and in line with these, four forms of critical entrepreneurship research. Based on illustrations from the extant literature, we demonstrate how each perspective champions a different conclusion with regard to what the emancipatory or oppressive potential of entrepreneurship may consist of.

In lieu of an abstract, here a short extract from the introduction: ... when using the term “critical” in CES (Critical Entrepreneurship Studies), we have in mind research which deliber- ately goes against the grain of functionalism and its deterministic view of human nature, reality and research, with the aim of opening up space to critique the canon of accepted knowledge and to create the conditions for rearticulating entrepreneurship in light of issues pertaining to freedom, emancipation or societal production. We seek to challenge and destabilise existing knowledge to open up new and different understandings that may change society for the bet- ter; we seek to critique in order to create. In this way, CES can be thought of as a double move- ment which critically engages with the mainstream of entrepreneurship only in order to break it open so that novel possibilities, be they practical or conceptual, can take flight. As we write this text, research that challenges the mainstream of entrepreneurship research clearly outnumbers studies which set out to rearticulate entrepreneurship as a society-creating force whose broader effects have emancipatory purchase, not merely economic utility. To carve out the unique poten- tial of CES, we would like to sketch out, if only tangentially, different strands and research tradi- tions which bear relevance for a critical understanding of entrepreneurship.

Past research on team boundary work has focused on a “cold,” information-exchange perspective to explain why boundary activities affect team innovation. Although the theory is widely accepted, empirical studies on the actual mechanism are scant and produce inconsistent results. Drawing from Interaction Ritual Theory (Collins, 2004), we propose a “warm,” affective perspective that emphasizes team emotional energy – a shared feeling of enthusiasm among team members – as a mechanism linking boundary work and team innovation. Moreover, we examine a theory-driven contextual factor –team role overload – that modifies the hypothesized mediated relationship. Based on field data from four different sources of 89 automotive research and development teams (comprising 724 employees, 89 direct supervisors and 18 managers), we found that both team boundary-spanning and boundary-buffering activities are associated with higher levels of team emotional energy, which, in turn, are related to greater levels of team innovation. Moreover, the mediated relationship of boundary-buffering activities, team emotional energy and team innovation is moderated by team role overload, such that the mediated relationship is stronger when team role overload is higher. Our study contributes to the literature by broadening our understanding of why boundary work is effective and when it matters most.

NGOs are increasingly recognized as factual stakeholders of companies. Stakeholder Theory deals with the question whether NGOs are legitimate stakeholders of corporations. This paper argues that NGOs can only be considered legitimate stakeholders of companies if they are legitimate representatives of civil society. It is based on the assumption that NGOs act as organizations with normative claims. The aim is to outline to what normative framework NGOs as organizations with normative claims are geared. This is done by outlining the central terms of the research question and by investigating which political model provides the most adequate interpretations of these notions. It will be that the deliberative model of democracy represents the most fruitful approach to the research question at hand.

We develop a two-region model where the decentralized provision of spillover goods and other public expenditures is financed by means of user fees. We show that a decentralized solution tends to be inefficient. If the regional spillover goods are substitutes, user fees tend to be inefficiently low, whereas they tend to be inefficiently high if the spillover goods are complements.