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Sustainability innovation research suggests that when the managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) perceive sustainability as strategic, they undertake sustainable innovation. Educational interventions are, in turn, suggested to foster such views among these managers. But in the interaction between educators and managers, power matters for how knowledge is conveyed and educational interventions are understudied, especially when they are university-led. This article examines how actors' power affects the translation of knowledge between educators and SME managers. A conceptual framework combining translation and power-dependency theory is introduced and applied to the case study of a University-led competence development program offered to construction company managers in Sweden. The analysis reveals how imbalanced dependencies and power within interactions accumulated over time and came to interfere with the program's learning objectives. The study contributes practically by suggesting how mutual goals, time management, and relationship building can create a better context for educator-SME interactions and SME sustainability. The scientific contribution lies in introducing a new perspective on educational interventions for SMEs and providing a conceptual framework for future studies thereof. 

Corporate codes of ethics (CCEs) have become increasingly prevalent as overarching ethical guidelines for multinational corporations doing business around the globe. As formal documents, governing corporations’ work, policies, and ways of doing business, CCEs are meant to guide all business activities and apply to all of the corporation’s employees, suppliers, and business partners. In multinational corporations, this means that diverse countries, cultures, and a myriad of heterogeneous actors are expected to abide by the same standards and guidelines, as stipulated in the CCE. Despite this empirical reality, CCEs have previously been approached by academics mainly as passive company documents or as marketing or management tools, in the contexts of their country of origin. Building on Actor-Network Theory this thesis applies an interactionist ontology, and relational epistemology, seeing the code as a sociomaterial object with both material and immaterial characteristics, and moving in a global arena. Furthermore, the CCEs are assumed to be susceptible to change, i.e. translations. With these assumptions, the CCE of a multinational corporation is followed as it travels between its country of origin (Sweden) and another country (China) and goes to work in different contexts. Heterogeneous empirical materials such as interviews, company documents, observations, shadowing, and emails are used to present stories from different contexts where the CCE is at work. The overall purpose of the thesis is to contribute to the theorizing of CCEs, thereby providing further understanding of the possible consequences of CCEs in contextually diverse settings. By following traces of a CCE, this study posits the need for a simultaneous understanding of three dimensions of CCEs for CCEs to be understood in contextually dispersed settings. The three dimensions are a) material translations of the code, b) enactments of these translations, and c) ideas associated with the material and enacted code.  The study contributes to the understanding of CCEs by highlighting a specific country-context (China), by putting together knowledge from codes in various contexts, and the overarching contribution lies in highlighting codes as different kinds of objects and adding to the existing literature – specifically, contextualizing the CCE as a vaporous object.

Corporate codes of ethics are integrated into supplier-auditing processes in the hope of ensuring sustainability throughout the supply chain. But little is known about what actually happens when one standardized code of ethics is disseminated and applied in audits on suppliers across the globe. This study builds on the literature on the ‘translation of management ideas’ and examines what happens when a corporate code of ethics travels in a global context. The specific case reports on a Swedish Multinational Corporation (MNC) with a standardized code of ethics applied in the practice of auditing a supplier in Eastern China. The study shows that the code can be translated in different ways in different organizational and geographical contexts. Observations of and interviews about how the code is translated in practice indicate that the code's ethics are negotiable. It is argued that sustainability and ethics are in danger of being negotiated or completely undermined when efficiency and contractual agreements set the agenda for audits, and that the relative buyer–supplier power relation can play a vital role in setting standards and demanding supplier compliance.

This paper addresses certain methodological aspects of a researchproject, in which an epistemological symmetry is assumed between humans and nonhumans,and this paper is about what implications and challenges such a premise mayentail for the data collection and analysis of the study. Although I adhere strongly to thenotion of epistemological symmetry in theory, there are certain aspects with such a studythat pose methodological challenges and this paper sheds light upon these challenges anddiscusses ways to deal with them. The major concern is retaining the epistemologicalsymmetry throughout the data collection and analysis of the study. This paperinvestigates the methodological aspects of a study on transformations of and by corporatecodes of ethics to analyze how corporate responsibility is influenced. The paper, henceexplores how we can, theoretically and practically, study a non-human actor (in this case,a code), with similar epistemological capabilities as a human actor, in a human-centeredworld.