Labour market integration in an MNC- Crafting social sustainability from below

Abstract: The growing demand of corporations to take social responsibility for their businesses has contributed to a spectrum of corporate social responsibility literature. Though how companies actually operationalise social sustainability is less established. Informed by institutional entrepreneurship theory this paper examines how novel practices of social sustainability are created in the context of multinational corporations. Previous research has found that corporate social responsibility and social sustainability initiatives are reliant on actors’ own initiatives, often multi-scalar, dependent on relations, which can be carried out by actors in collectives. The paper used a qualitative approach and data was collected through 22 semi-structured interviews with production-managers, HR-managers, CSR-managers, participants of VEP-Production and external partners. In total, four observations were conducted as well as a focus group with participants. By using the process of institutional entrepreneurship as a lens, this paper shows how actors come together as collective of institutional entrepreneurs and creates this novel social recruitment channel as a result of a) their features b) their ability to mobilize resources and c) encouraging and maintaining the new method. Hence social sustainability is operationalized by the creation of a new recruitment channel bridging talent management and labour market integration and this paper reveals how actors work as a coalition leveraging their agency, resources and own embeddedness to carry out change.