Word from the Guest Editors Responsibility and international management

Living and working together internationally is, by its very nature, synonymous with great diversity. This is one of the major challenges of our time for organizations and their employees, both locally and internationally, in a context marked by the imperatives of environmental, economic, and digital transitions, as well as corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this thematic issue, we want to explore international management from the perspective of responsibility, in response to the often privileged perspective of performance. Our aim is to gain a better understanding of how responsible behavior emerges and evolves, especially in these times of post-pandemics, crises, and major environmental and social challenges facing humanity. For this thematic issue, we have therefore invited contributions that, through the prism of international and comparative management, examine the individual and organizational behaviors that are eminently responsible at the international level and are therefore recognized as such. In Anglo-Saxon research, international organizational behavior is a clearly identified and recognized field called International Organizational Behavior. This fertile field, whose origins can be traced to authors such as Nancy Adler (1990), encourages an openness to the analysis of organizational behavior across national borders. On the one hand, this trend has made it possible to conduct comparative analyses of cultures and the impact of cultural diversity on organizational behavior in both private and public organizations (Chanlat and Pierre, 2018; D’Iribarne, 1989; Hofstede 1980; Mouillot and Bartel-Radic, 2020; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 2004). On the other hand, it has spawned truly intercultural work in the sense that it analyzes the management of international organizations and teams, with an emphasis on intercultural skills as a necessary condition for successful interactions (Hajro and Pudelko, 2010). For a long time, cultural diversity was seen as an obstacle, a difficulty for management. In the last decade or so, however, calls for a more positive and constructive approach have multiplied (Bausch, Barmeyer and Mayrhofer, 2021; Stahl and Tung, 2015). While cultural diversity thus embraces the paradox (Lewis, 2000) of managing both difficulty and wealth, its management is still poorly understood. A fruitful contemporary current approaches it through boundary spanning, studying the actors who “build bridges” across these boundaries, as well as the activities they carry out (Bartel-Radic and Munch, 2023; Schotter, Mudambi, Doz and Gaur, 2017). Nearly 30 years ago, languages and linguistic diversity were considered a forgotten factor in international management (Marschan, Welch and Welch, 1997). Today, research on language diversity (Church-Morel and Bartel-Radic, 2016) is the subject of a productive and fully established stream within international management research communities (Brannen, Piekkari and Tietze, 2014). In particular, this research examines how language diversity affects professional interactions, organizational processes and work outcomes (Piekkari, Gaibrois and Johansson, 2022). Several recent journal articles and books describe the state of this line of research (Brannen and Mughan, 2017; Karhunen, Kankaanranta, Louhiala-Salminen and Piekkari, 2018; Lecomte, Vigier, Gaibrois and Beeler, 2023; Tenzer, Terjesen and Harzing, 2017). Current topics of interest include linguistic diversity and virtual work (Taylor, 2021), power (Tienari, 2023), international mobility (Back and Piekkari, 2024), and refugees (Hokkinen and Barner-Rasmussen, 2023). Most research in this area currently focuses on the responsible management of diversity. Organizational responsibility, often summarized under the term CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), is a rich, ambivalent concept and therefore complex to define. It is the subject of lively debate (Chapple and Moon, 2007; Payaud and Martinet, 2010; Pesqueux, 2009) and questions the impact, positive or negative, of organizational behavior on stakeholders (Freeman, 1984). The latter have become increasingly important, both externally and internally, for example, in the spotlight of scandals that have hit multinational organizations with irresponsible behavior (Daudigeos, Roulet and …