Global Issues and Transnational Social Spaces: The Attention of Multinational Enterprises to Grand Challenges

Researchers often regard multinational enterprises (MNEs) as pivotal to addressing grand challenges, such as ensuring decent work, promoting clean energy, and handling climate change. We investigate the extent to which MNEs perceive themselves in this role by examining the intensity of attention they signal to grand challenges and the similarity of this attention among MNEs from within the same home country. By adopting an institutional perspective on MNEs as transnational social spaces, we argue that the intensity and similarity of the attention MNEs devote to grand challenges are influenced by institutional demands stemming from their embeddedness in multiple national contexts. Our findings reveal that although institutional demands do not affect the intensity of the attention MNEs give to grand challenges, they significantly influence the similarity of attention among MNEs from the same home country. These findings contribute to research on the ways in which MNEs address grand challenges and the literature on transnational social spaces and organizational institutionalism.