Corporate governance practices and regulations vary across countries and regions, reflecting the institutional diversity of capitalism and the different challenges and opportunities faced by firms and stakeholders (Aguilera & Jackson, 2003). Such differences matter not only for financial performance, but also for the increasingly pressing issues of social responsibility and environmental sustainability (Jakson & Rathert, 2017). However, many of the theories attempting to capture this diversity remain firmly rooted in the experience and intellectual tradition of the Global North. The extent to which concepts and theories developed based on that tradition translate to the context of emerging economies in the Global South is questionable. Some of the most widely used concepts to describe contexts in the Global South – like ‘institutional voids’ – are deeply problematic in terms of ethnocentric and universalistic assumptions that underpins them (Bothello et al., 2020).

As economies from the Global South become increasingly central players in the global economy and will shape the future not just of the world economy, but also of our natural environment, there is an increasing need for a global dialogue on corporate governance, responsibility, and sustainability. Such a dialogue can inform theories of corporate governance, responsibility, and sustainability and allow us to start developing a context-sensitive understanding of economic activity, which is needed to start building truly universalistic concepts allowing us to address the common issues such as climate change, human rights, corruption, and inequality that humanity is facing.

In this spirit, the aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from different disciplines and perspectives to explore the theoretical and empirical aspects of corporate governance and the institutional diversity of capitalism across the Global North, Global South, and their implications for sustainability and social responsibility. We are particularly interested in contributions that use institutional theory and comparative capitalism literature to analyse how corporate governance systems and practices are shaped by and interact with the institutional environments in which they operate. We welcome papers that advance our understanding of the diversity and dynamics of capitalist systems and their implications for corporate governance and responsibility. We also invite studies that challenge the ethnocentric bias and universalistic assumptions that often underlie organizational studies and corporate governance research. We encourage papers that adopt a contextualized and comparative approach that recognizes the richness and power of informal and non-market institutions in shaping local economic activity.