The question of how social enterprises (SEs)-organizations that work to solve social issues through innovative ideas and strategies-utilize the web to internationalize has received little attention in electronic business literature. We address this issue by examining whether SEs pursue a web globalization strategy that is standardized across national markets or localized and culturally customized to individual locales. Accepted knowledge about e-commerce corporations predicts that these firms would be better off with web localization. However, an investigation using content analysis and two case studies complemented with face-to-face and digital interviews reveals that SEs differ inherently from for-profit businesses in web globalization. Specifically, this paper shows that SEs adopt a web strategy high on standardization to mobilize, educate, advocate, and recruit would-be donors, influencers, and volunteers. Such a strategy allows SEs to build legitimacy and reinforce their global brand. Our empirical findings show the uniqueness of SEs' digital context from profit-oriented e-commerce corporations and the need for a suitable theoretical framework.

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La Oroya, Peru, and Herculaneum, Missouri, USA, are two cities 4,000 miles apart but beset with common health and environmental risk: high levels of lead contamination. A key participant in this unfolding tale of environmental disaster has been The Renco Group, a privately held investment holding company based in New York. This case study sheds light on The Renco Group’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in a developing country (Peru) as distinct from CSR in a developed country (USA) by presenting the distinctive set of formal and informal forces that shape the ethical outcome. The question – one which animates much of this case – is what mechanisms exist that work either collectively or individually to encourage or even require a privately-owned firm to act in a socially responsible manner or, more modestly, to cease activities that are deemed to harm society or the general welfare in a multi-country context?

Despite increased importance of SEs in the global marketplace, limited research in social entrepreneurship addresses internationalization, and fewer from a behavioural perspective. We fill this gap by investigating the SE manager’s behavioural attributes and their influence on the decision of social entrepreneurs to become international social entrepreneurs (ISEs) through an exploratory design using content analysis and interviews. All social entrepreneurs were driven to address social change by a strong social conscience; however, this research finds that ISEs shared an urgent and personal call to action. This sense of urgency developed from transformative experiences that altered their views of the world and their place within it. Domestic social entrepreneurs were motivated primarily by their social conscience, shared background, and the timing of the social enterprise opportunity, factors previously identified in research.