Transnational Communities in MNE Organizing for Sustainability: Toward a Typology

Humanity is facing a range of grand challenges, and multinational enterprises (MNEs), as a prominent organizational form, have the potential to be not only part of the problem but also part of the solution. However, to better understand how MNEs can address grand challenges, we need to broaden our analytical perspective, to capture the various social systems within which MNEs are embedded. We argue that we can shed new light on the MNE–grand challenges nexus by applying the analytical lens of the transnational community (TC) to the MNE. This lens presents us with the opportunity to take a bird’s-eye view of the MNE and to systematically categorize the different transnational communities that operate within it, with the aim to identify patterns across this emerging body of research. We proceed, first, by developing a typology of transnational communities that operate within the MNE; second, by drawing out the dimensions along which they differ from each other; and third, by considering the roles the various TCs play in the MNE’s efforts to address grand challenges in the context of sustainability.