This paper examines the sustainability claims of private quality standards, voluntary adopted by supermarket to improve the quality of products in respect of food safety, and environmental and social sustainability. The concept of ‘sustainability’ is defined as the opportunity for upgrading...

The debate on globalization has long been characterized by theses of institutional convergence and divergence. The emergence of Anglo-Saxon shareholder capitalism as the dominant paradigm since the start of the 1990s is associated with the pursuit of global strategies by Multinational...

Recent work has emphasized the importance of regional strategies downstream, adding new depth to the debate on ‘globalization’. This paper adds to the debate by exploring the regional dimension upstream for a sample of Triad-based Fortune 500 firms. We find support for our hypothesis that...

Since the early 1990s international - or even global - outsourcing of intermediate products from suppliers has been propagated as a key means to improve the performance of firms. It is argued that becoming more lean and internationally focused is beneficial for the buyer as well as for the...

The current understanding of Regional Integration is largely macro-economic and political in orientation and has tended to neglect, even ex post, the significance of the Single European Market (SEM) for the spatial restructuring of individual firms. The problem stems largely from a lopsided...