International Business, digital technologies and sustainable development: Connecting the dots

Building on emerging debates on the ‘dark’ and ‘bright’ side of digital globalization, and calls for considering its environmental and social implications in more detail, this perspective article seeks to ‘unravel’ these components of ‘the digital age’ for International Business (IB). Inspired by the affordance perspective developed in Information Systems research, we offer IB scholars a new approach to ‘zoom in’ on the (potential) role of individual novel technologies in addressing specific sustainable development issues. Three examples illustrate the relevance of this approach for multinationals and for developing innovative research avenues in IB, which extend existing insights on digital globalization.