Internationalisation and sustainability as a field: a contingent view of comparative management via Bourdieusian sociology

Abstract

This paper was developed with the objective of analysing, via the Bourdieusian sociology, the field that discusses the relationship between internationalisation of corporations and sustainability. This bibliometric study was constructed in two phases: the first, quantitative-descriptive and the second, qualitative-exploratory. For the quantitative-descriptive analysis of the field it was discovered 113 papers, published in 43 journals, written by 272 researchers spread in 166 educational and research institutions, which are spread across 44 countries. For the qualitative-exploratory analysis of the field the contents of the papers were analysed from the discursive standards about the relationship between internationalisation of corporations and sustainability proposed by Borim-de-Souza et al. (2015), who have approached the internationalisation of corporations from explanatory approaches of the comparative management theory and the sustainability from explanatory approaches of the sustainable development and of the sustainability itself. It was identified that the field is dominated by a non-critical postcolonialist discursive standard.