Advancing Refugee Employment through Bilateral Collaboration: The Role of Businesses

The facilitation of refugee employment is a grand challenge that requires well-coordinated action among many stakeholders. However, research on refugee employment is yet to develop recommendations on coordinating stakeholder engagement across sectors and on aligning their resources. Our paper positions businesses at the center of a multi-stakeholder effort, focusing on the creation of bilateral collaboration and reciprocal value between businesses and each of the key stakeholders engaged as the key to the sustainable response to the social issue. By providing an understanding of how businesses can work with these key stakeholders, our paper highlights that sharing of resources and knowledge across sectors enables a sustained collaborative effort. In our theorization, we explain that the stakeholders bring different resources and knowledge to the businesses (and vice versa) in a complementary way that leads to the creation of reciprocal value for both parties and contributes to achieving greater social value.