Local supplier corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries represents a powerful tool to improve labour conditions. This paper pursues an inter-organizational network approach to the global value chain (GVC) literature to understand the influence of suppliers' collective behaviour on their CSR engagement. This exploratory study of 30 export-oriented and first-tier apparel suppliers in Bangladesh, a developing country, makes three relevant contributions to GVC scholarship. First, we show that suppliers are interlinked in a horizontal network that restricts unilateral CSR engagement. This is justified in that unilateral CSR engagement is a source of heterogeneity in labour practices; consequently, it triggers worker unrest. Second, we present and discuss an exploratory framework based on four scenarios of how suppliers currently engage in CSR given their network's pressure toward collective behaviour: unofficial CSR engagement, geographic isolation, size and competitive differentiation, and external pressure. Finally, we show the need to spread CSR homogeneously among suppliers and to reconceptualize the meaning of CSR in developing countries, encouraging more scrutiny toward horizontal dynamics.

This paper investigates the process of stakeholder collaboration between firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Sweden. Collaboration is increasing in importance for corporate social responsibility (CSR); however, the literature does not adequately address how firms and NGOs begin and advance their relationships. This paper focuses on one fashion retailer and four NGOs in Sweden, implementing a resource-based view to better understand CSR. These NGOs support the firm's CSR toward asylum applicants and low-income individuals. This study makes three contributions to the CSR literature. First, it finds that the firm and NGOs select each other based on their resources, but for different reasons. Second, it demonstrates that NGOs adjust to corporate demands, but whether this hampers mission integrity depends on the balance between current and future potential for resource acquisition. Finally, it shows the influence of the Swedish context on CSR, arguing that public opinion can be shifted through policy making.

Very little is known about the cost landscape for parametrized Quantum Circuits (PQCs). Nevertheless, PQCs are employed in Quantum Neural Networks and Variational Quantum Algorithms, which may allow for near-term quantum advantage. Such applications require good optimizers to train PQCs. Recent works have focused on quantum-aware optimizers specifically tailored for PQCs. However, ignorance of the cost landscape could hinder progress towards such optimizers. In this work, we analytically prove two results for PQCs: (1) We find an exponentially large symmetry in PQCs, yielding an exponentially large degeneracy of the minima in the cost landscape. (2) We show that noise (specifically non-unital noise) can break these symmetries and lift the degeneracy of minima, making many of them local minima instead of global minima. Based on these results, we introduce an optimization method called Symmetry-based Minima Hopping (SYMH), which exploits the underlying symmetries in PQCs to hop between local minima in the cost landscape. The versatility of SYMH allows it to be combined with local optimizers (e.g., gradient descent) with minimal overhead. Our numerical simulations show that SYMH improves the overall optimizer performance.

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