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Abstract

The humanitarian crisis associated with the forced displacement of people who are refugees and asylum seekers has become more and more acute in recent years. According to the UNHCR (2022), there are 35.3 million refugees and 5.4 million asylum seekers in the world, meaning that there are more people who have been forcibly displaced from their societies of origin than at any other point in history. People who become refugees are fleeing civil wars and international conflicts as well as persecution, poverty, and violence in their countries of origin, and they are seeking safety elsewhere (Collier & Betts, 2017; Parekh, 2020). The forces driving people to flee their birthplaces and resettle elsewhere, which increasingly include climate change and other environmental changes (Atapattu, 2020; Kolmes et al., 2022), are likely only to grow in prominence over time. This trend poses challenges to both countries that are sources of refugees and those receiving them.

There is a robust literature on the legal obligations that governments owe to refugees (Gilbert, 2019; Hathaway, 2021), as well as on societal attitudes toward them (Cowling et al., 2019; Czymara, 2021; Shaw et al., 2021). Missing, however, from scholarship to date has been an examination of refugee crises as a business and society issue that seeks to understand how (and why) businesses should respond. This special issue was created to remedy that deficit. In this opening essay, we will discuss the contexts in which refugee crises occur, outline why business and society scholarship on this topic is needed, preview the papers contained in this special issue, offer a research agenda for scholars in the field, and discuss how this topic is emblematic of other macro-level forces that are exogenous to business.

Contexts of Displacement: The Rise of Factors Contributing to Unsafe Living Conditions

Refugee crises are not new, of course. The causes of refugee crises—wars of various kinds, localized violence, persecution, and poverty—have long been present, although rapid environmental changes have exacerbated all four in recent decades and are likely to become more important over time. Both societal-level instability (Newman et al., 2022) and injustice (Parekh, 2012) fuel the emergence and persistence of refugee crises, which are becoming more numerous and affecting more people over time (UNHCR, 2022). If we understand refugees and asylum seekers as people who are fleeing unsafe conditions to move to places where they are safe (or at least safer), it is essential to consider the causes that push people to leave their countries of origin (Kang, 2021; Klaus & Pachocka, 2019).

War—whether civil wars within a country (Turkoglu & Chadefaux, 2019) or wars between states (Moorthy & Brathwaite, 2019)—is a major driver of refugee crises. Furthermore, flows of refugees can cause and sustain intrastate and interstate conflicts (Salehyan & Gleditsch, 2006). People who become refugees due to war may live in their host countries for decades and yet be poorly integrated in them (Alkhaled & Sasaki, 2022; Eloubeidi & Reuter, 2023; Knudsen, 2009). Civil wars in places like Syria (Bahout, 2014; Ostrand, 2015) and wars between states such as the war against Ukraine by Russia (Elinder et al., 2023) can cause and sustain refugee crises. However, civil wars have become increasingly common, constituting a higher proportion of conflicts than in previous decades. While other forms of interpersonal violence, such as interstate conflicts, have declined, the number of civil wars has increased by 50% from 2001 to 2022 (Walter, 2023). As intrastate conflicts increase in prevalence, their role in bringing about new refugee crises is another important area for research. This is particularly important given that many people who become refugees from these conflicts move to countries already facing significant economic and social challenges. Such mass movements of people can cause increased conflict in host countries (Zhou & Shaver, 2021) as well as environmental damage (Hossain, 2023) and economic harm (Baloch et al., 2017).

However, interpersonal violence, even at levels below civil war, can lead people to seek asylum outside their countries of origin. For instance, in many countries, a climate of unpunished violence against women often compels them to flee and seek asylum elsewhere (El-Moslemany et al., 2022; Gorman, 2019). Nonstate actors such as criminal gangs can also cause people to become asylum seekers (Law, 2020), and people who are persecuted because they are sexual minorities in their countries of origin (Streed et al., 2023) often seek refuge in safe countries. Wars are not the only cause of displacement; victims of nonstate conflicts, though often categorized differently by host countries compared to victims of political violence, are similarly seeking safety away from their countries of origin.

Poverty, too, can drive people to leave their countries of origin in search of resettlement. There is a robust body of research on the legal and ethical distinctions between people who are refugees and people who are economic migrants (Wyszynski et al., 2020). This raises a key question: should people who are political refugees be treated differently from people who are economic refugees (Ghoshal & Crowley, 1983)? We need not address such questions here, except to note that the fundamental issue is related to personal safety in societies of origin. As long as there is deprivation and oppression in countries of origin, and the possibility of a better life by leaving such countries, there will be people seeking refuge in other places. Refugee and asylum issues will, tragically, continue to be important issues of local and global concern today, and into the future.

The Need for Business and Society Scholarship on Refugee Crises

While the humanitarian issues associated with refugees for individual societies and regions are clear—and the suffering of many refugees and asylum seekers is manifest—there has been less research to date on how businesses engage with refugee crises. Although businesses are affected by refugee crises and, in turn, can act in ways that benefit refugees, communities, and countries, this alone does not automatically create a normative obligation or a business imperative for businesses to take action. Indeed, in helping refugees, either through hiring them or advocating for their inclusion in society, businesses may face opposition from host communities and countries that are opposed to the presence and perceived economic competition from refugees (Richardson et al., 2020). Businesses therefore face significant challenges—institutional, political, ideological, and discursive—in developing and implementing responses to refugee crises. However, the existence of such challenges does not give businesses a pass from responding to them.

Despite the expanding critical and postcolonial research connecting refugee crises with neoliberalism, free market economies, the diminishing state responsibilities for public well-being, and the rising influence of modern enterprise (Dutt & Kohfeldt, 2019; Grossi & Argento, 2022), much of the business scholarship still centers on meso-level analysis. At this level, businesses are generally not considered responsible for refugee crises such as civil wars and interstate conflicts. And, while some businesses have exacerbated some causes of people seeking refuge and asylum—for example, by contributing to climate crises that will over time lead to people being displaced in their societies of origin—the contribution of any one business to any one refugee crisis is likely to be remote at best. In this sense, although refugee crises are largely exogenous to businesses, they function as social forces that affect businesses and that businesses in turn can affect. Refugee crises therefore are fertile ground to consider the place of businesses in—and the responsibilities of businesses to—their societies. If businesses are members of the societies in which they operate, as are individual people, how should they respond to the human suffering associated with people leaving their countries and resettling elsewhere?

Refugee crises are a kind of “grand challenge” that should force us to think about the relationship and boundaries between business and society, as well as the proper role of business in domains for which they do not necessarily bear direct responsibility. As such, refugee crises raise important questions about the relationship between business and society, as well as the content of businesses’ responsibilities for seemingly exogenous crises. We also suggest that refugee crises surface new questions about how we conceptualize and theorize the relationship between business and society. In particular, they push us to think about whether existing frameworks and constructs are adequate in the global environment in which business operates, or if new frameworks and normative groundings for business responsibility are needed. Put another way, what do refugee crises illustrate about the changing nature of the relationship between business and society? In a related vein, do refugee crises require us to rethink not only the boundaries of that relationship, but also the nature and content of the ethical responsibilities of business? In this respect, we argue that there are a variety of literatures within traditional business and society scholarship (crisis management, social movements), as well as outside of it (development studies, labor economics, emergency management), that might be brought to bear on this topic as well as proving useful for the business and society field more generally.

Growing research has examined how people from a refugee background re-establish their livelihoods after leaving their home countries (e.g., Bache, 2020; Campion, 2018) or refugee issues as a labor market problem (Collier & Betts, 2017) that includes the problem of integration (Hirst et al., 2023). Still other research has assessed the ways in which refugee entrepreneurship benefits both refugees and their host countries (Newman et al., 2023). However, limited work to date has examined the implications of the refugee crisis for business (Richardson et al., 2020). The special issue was conceived to foster new research and thinking about this important topic, befitting the ambit of the journal.

Papers in the Special Issue

This special issue comprises seven papers. Many of these articles examine the role played by cross-sector partnerships among government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and business organizations in supporting refugee integration. A common thread that emerges among these articles is the centrality of partnerships in addressing refugee crises, collectively revealing that while cross-sector collaborations are crucial for integrating refugees into labor markets and creating value for them, these partnerships are also fraught with challenges (e.g., trust issues, power imbalances, and the need for alignment of diverse interests and logics). This common thread underscores not only the importance of partnerships but also the necessity of careful management of the complexities within these collaborations to ensure they are effective and equitable.

The paper by Karakulak and Faul (2024) undertook qualitative research by analyzing data from 74 interviews and 143 pages of organizational documents. They found that the frames of refugees held by partners in cross-sector partnerships impacted the value creation activities undertaken for beneficiaries (the refugees themselves) and determined whether value is created as well as the types of value created. This article makes an important contribution by identifying the different types of value creation activities undertaken for beneficiaries and how the implementation context influences the value creation potential of partnerships.

Wehrle et al. (2024) explored the role played by cross-sector partnerships between employees and other partners in supporting the integration of refugees through employment. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 37 employers and 27 case support workers, they explored how employers’ experiences with other stakeholders in cross-sector partnerships influenced their trust in such stakeholders. Based on their findings, they propose a process model that describes how unmet expectations around collaboration, and negative assessments of collaborators’ attitudes and behaviors, lead to perceived trust breaches. This, in turn, arguement leads to a hesitancy among employers to hire refugees and/or to engage in cross-sector collaborations. This article makes an important contribution by applying theories on trust to the contexts of cross-sector partnerships and examining the impact of trust breaches in cross-sector partnerships on service provision.

Harsman (2024) undertook qualitative research to examine the role played by cross-sector partnerships in supporting skilled migrants, especially those from refugee backgrounds into the German labor market. In this article, interviews were conducted with representatives from partners; the authors also spent time observing partnership-specific events and internal documents from the partnerships. This article makes a contribution by examining how partners in cross-sector partnerships navigate and rein in competing and contradictory logics to reproduce the dominant government logic, and in doing so, establish a high level of institutional coherence.

Finally, Henriksen (2024) also looked at factors that influenced the effective functioning of cross-sector partnerships. This article examined how nonprofit partners and business organizations seek a compromise to find a “sweet spot” between supporting both humanitarian and business interests. Based on an ethnographic case study of partnerships between a global humanitarian organization and five technology businesses, they examined how alignment in cross-sector partnerships occurs in practice. They found that in the construction of alignment, the interests of the business organizations become the priority to which nonprofits must align their and their beneficiaries’ needs. This article shows the impact of power dynamics on practices of alignment in cross-sector partnerships and that the ideals of alignment differ from the actual practices of alignment.

Adopting a different perspective, in this special issue, Cooper and Wang (2024) examine the involvement of business organizations in supporting refugees through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. They explore how these businesses report on such involvement by drawing on institutional and constitutive approaches to CSR. This involves analyzing why organizations declare their engagement in refugee issues, using the concept of decoupling to examine the alignment between reported CSR policy and CSR activity. Analyzing data from Fortune Global 500 CSR reports between 2012 and 2019—a period marked by an increase in global refugee activity—they find that few multinational business organizations offer programs specifically targeted at refugees, and even fewer feature refugee-specific programs that are “coupled” with either CSR policies or impacts. From these findings, they develop a typology that depicts business organizations as reactionary, recurring, relevant, or revelatory, and highlight implications for CSR programming in response to other emerging social issues.

Other articles in the special issue diverge from the themes of partnerships and CSR, shifting to a more granular level of analysis. These pieces delve into the experiences of refugees as they seek employment and engage in entrepreneurship within their receiving countries. Taken together, the two remaining articles focus on the professional and entrepreneurial aspects of refugee experiences in their host countries. Both studies highlight the importance of individual agency, identity, and social factors in the integration process.

Groutsis et al. (2024) examined the lived experience of a Syrian refugee from a professional background in navigating the re-establishment of her career in Australia through engagement with the business community. In particular, they examined how she was able to overcome the stigma of being a refugee through drawing on her human capital, social networks, and a desire for recognition and sense of self-worth. Christensen and Newman (2024) developed a conceptual model and associated propositions regarding the identity management strategies adopted by refugee entrepreneurs on arrival in their host country. Drawing on acculturation psychology and founder identity, they argue that the strategies adopted depend on their identity with their former life and degree of connection they desire in the receiving community. More specifically, they describe two identity management strategies: reinvention (distancing oneself from one’s home country identity) and reinforcement (maintaining a strong connection to one’s home country identity) and propose acculturation outcomes associated with each strategy.

The articles in the special issue do much to illuminate the role that businesses play in responding to refugee crises and further enhance our understanding of important business and society research topics such as cross-sector partnerships, the ways in which business facilitate integration of immigrants and refugee entrepreneurship.

A Further Research Agenda for Business Responses to Refugee Crises

The papers published in the special issue largely focused on refugees themselves and how business activities have benefited them through enhanced integration in their host countries, including via cross-sector partnerships. Conceptualizing refugee engagement and employment as a kind of CSR, understanding the dynamics of refugee entrepreneurship or refugee integration, or engaging in other activities that benefit refugees in their host countries are all important elements of business responses to refugee crises, and we believe more work is needed in these areas. However, we also suggest that there are other future research questions in this domain that should be pursued by business and society scholars.

What Are the Consequences of Refugee Flows for Businesses?

One area for further research is related to how refugee flows affect businesses in sending, transit, and host countries. While the papers in the special issue focused on host countries, it is important to consider the effects on sending and transit countries because refugee flows can profoundly influence business environments in these countries. In some cases, they may lead to social and economic instability, adversely affecting national business environments. Conversely, refugees can also benefit businesses, for instance, by filling labor shortages and bridging skills gaps in host societies (Wang & Chaudhri, 2019)—which means, by extension, that businesses in sending countries may lose access to important labor force skills.

Looking at the effects of refugee crises on business and businesses shifts the focus of attention, reorienting the conversation toward understanding refugee flows as a social and economic force that affects business. More research is needed in this vein. Furthermore, we call on researchers to think through the relationship between refugee issues and frameworks for business responsibility—including not only CSR (discussed in one article in this special issue), but also business ethics and human rights (Einwiller et al., 2019; Goethals et al., 2017).

What Are the Barriers to Business Actions Related to Refugee Crises in Host Countries?

Another important topic of research in this domain relates to barriers to business actions related to refugee crises, including ideological concerns within host societies. Responses to refugee crises reveal much about the attitudes and values of host societies (Bojadžijev, 2018). Refugee integration—for which businesses play an important role—occurs in the context of wider political debates (Ferris, 2020). There is often a climate of hostility toward refugees in host countries (Di Mauro & Memoli, 2021; Hynie, 2018), although there is some evidence that this can be overstated and indeed ameliorated (Sana, 2021). Businesses, however, do need to consider the wider social context in which they respond to refugee crises, including dominant local ideologies.

Business and society research in this area could include analyses of how do, can, and should businesses navigate tensions between host-country expectations (including governments and communities, both of which may or may not be hostile to refugees) and their responsibilities related to refugee crises (Szkudlarek et al., 2021). Related to local ideologies are the sociocultural, legislative, and/or geopolitical barriers restricting or discouraging businesses’ roles in supporting in refugee integration (Hesse et al., 2019), which also merit scholarly attention. Finally, future research might usefully examine the roles that businesses have played, or could play, in lobbying or pushing for national legislative or transnational governance frameworks to facilitate refugee employment. More generally, understanding how local context creates opportunities or barriers to business action on refugee crises is vital for advancing the field, as businesses do need to account for social and societal pressures in responding effectively to them.

What Questions Remain About Refugee Integration Into Host Countries?

Building on the research in this special issue, future research may answer important questions about refugee integration into host countries. Further research is needed on the links between the role of businesses in refugee crises and the broader conversation on development-oriented CSR as well as the business for peace movement (Oetzel & Miklian, 2017). In addition, scholarship can examine how businesses support humanitarian agencies in their work (Wang & Chaudhri, 2019) and the roles business can play in engaging government in refugee-oriented human resource development policies (Naccache & Al Ariss, 2017).

In short, refugee-related research is important in its own right, and the role that businesses can and should play in responding to refugee crises merits more scholarly examination. Refugee crises matter to businesses because they are a grand challenge for which businesses can contribute to addressing for the benefit of refugees themselves, as well as their host societies. Furthermore, refugee crises reveal much about what the relationship between business and society is, what it could be, and what it should be.

Business and Society Research on Macro-Level, Exogenous Forces

We previously noted that refugee crises are largely macro-level, exogenous forces that affect businesses. Businesses are not necessarily directly culpable or responsible for the existence of refugee crises, which occur due to wider social and political forces that are exogenous to them. However, businesses may at times be complicit, and even when not, they still have social and ethical responsibilities related to macro-level exogenous forces. As social institutions, businesses are affected by such forces, and in turn, they must respond to them in some way. In responding to them, however, businesses need to account for social attitudes and ideological concerns. In this respect, lessons from business responses to refugee crises are useful for understanding business responses to other macro-level social forces that individual businesses did not create or have responsibility for, but nevertheless need to address in some way.

However, one last area of research—and one that is challenging but essential to conceptualize and theorize about—is the extent to which some businesses can be partially culpable for particular refugee crises and how such culpability (if it exists) affects business responsibility in this domain (Dutt & Kohfeldt, 2019; Naccache & Al Ariss, 2017). While we have posited that refugee crises are largely macro-level exogenous forces to which businesses are able to respond to, a more provocative line of analysis would problematize that contention. One way to think about this issue is considering whether business behaviors can have harmful effects to background conditions that make wars and other forms of violence, climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, and other drivers of refugee crises more likely. Furthermore, in the same way that businesses can be complicit in human rights violations (Olsen & Bernal-Bermúdez, 2022; Wettstein, 2012), it is possible for them to be complicit in the actions of states that lead to refugee crises. Business culpability for refugee crises is, of course, context specific, and many businesses would not have any complicity at all. However, holding open the possibility that business actions can bring about—or more likely, contribute to—a refugee crisis might allow for theorizing about how businesses can have damaging macro-level effects, here including both sending and receiving countries for refugee flows.

Conclusion

Refugee crises have become more acute and numerous in the past several decades, and they are likely to increase as poverty and various forms of violence persist. Arguably, refugee crises will become more salient to businesses and societies because the causes of refugee crises are persistent. Businesses, as the articles in the special issue have demonstrated, can and indeed should play important roles in responding to them. Their actions can not only benefit individual refugees, but also the societies that host them. Alone and in partnership with other businesses, civil society organizations, and governments, they have a role to play in responding to refugee crises.

Businesses do have a nexus to refugee crises. One challenge of conceptualizing the relationship between business and society is understanding what businesses can and should do to respond to social issues for which they do not have direct culpability but do have the ability to respond to both alleviate human suffering and benefit the locales in which they operate. We hope that this special issue elevates the importance of refugee crises as important issues for business and society research and spurs further research on the topic.

Harry J. Van Buren IIIUniversity of Tennessee at Chattanooga Charlotte KaramUniversity of Ottawa Alexander NewmanUniversity of Melbourne, Australia Colin HigginsDeakin University, Australia

Footnotes

Author Biographies

Harry J. Van Buren III (PhD, University of Pittsburgh) is the Z. Lupton Patten Endowed Chair of Business Ethics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business as well as an honorary professor at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law. His publications have appeared journals that include Academy of Management Review, Business and Human Rights Journal, Business & Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Industrial Relations, and Journal of Management Studies. His current research interests include relational stakeholder theory, business and human rights, preventing human trafficking in global supply chains, and employment ethics. He serves as the religion, spirituality, and business ethics section co-editor at the Journal of Business Ethics.

Charlotte Karam (PhD, University of Windsor) is a tenured professor at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, and holds the Ian Telfer Professorship in Inclusive HR Systems. Her scholar-activist work contributes to overlapping conversations HRM, business ethics, responsible leadership, public policy, and feminist praxis. Her publications appear in the International Journal of Management Reviews, Business Ethics Quarterly, Organization Studies, Gender, Work and Organization, and others. She is the area editor for Feminism(s) at the Journal of Business Ethics. Previously a tenured Professor at American University of Beirut, she continues her involvement as an Adjunct Professor.

Alexander Newman (PhD, University of Nottingham) is a Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School, the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely in the areas of leadership, organizational psychology and ethics in journals such as Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business Ethics, and Business Ethics Quarterly.

Colin Higgins (PhD, Deakin University) is Professor of Management at Deakin University in Australia. He studies how business organizations both shape and are shaped by discourses and institutional drivers of sustainability through their reporting and communication efforts. He is current Co-Editor in Chief of Business & Society and immediate past division chair of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management.

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Conceptualizing,Theorizing,and Measuring the Contributions of Business to Refugee Crises

Abstract

Contexts of Displacement: The Rise of Factors Contributing to Unsafe Living Conditions

The Need for Business and Society Scholarship on Refugee Crises

Papers in the Special Issue

A Further Research Agenda for Business Responses to Refugee Crises

What Are the Consequences of Refugee Flows for Businesses?

What Are the Barriers to Business Actions Related to Refugee Crises in Host Countries?

What Questions Remain About Refugee Integration Into Host Countries?

Business and Society Research on Macro-Level, Exogenous Forces

Conclusion

Footnotes

Author Biographies

References