Abstract

Psychic Distance (PD) conceptually refers to a range of economic, cultural, legal and language differences, posing barriers/hazards to how businesses, markets, and people interact. Despite the traditional approach to systematic reviews focusing on the nature, scope, and impact of PD hazards at local and global company levels of operation, the fast pace and scale of socio-economic, political, and environmental changes require a more holistic and complex approach to enhance sustainable and responsible businesses. Such a gap calls for a research shift to cover
emerging challenges, and address climate change, biodiversity, pollution, and related sustainable environmental concerns. This developmental paper is a call to challenge traditional, dominant quantification approaches with the need for greater reflexive insights into organisations and people’s behaviours posing hazards to how businesses and society interact sustainably and responsibly. Implications of this reorientation will facilitate a better understanding of the changing nature, scale and impact of local and international trade, circular economies, contract violations, governance structures and policy frameworks. Therefore, this developmental paper focuses on a four-decade review of over 60 journal articles and survey data from 228 managers in Nigeria’s automobile industry. The results surface 4 sets of findings namely 1) occasional use of theory-informed PD scholarship on contractual violations, 2) dominance of statistical research designs, 3) sampling and data collection techniques based mainly on 65% quantitative, probability samplings and 4) PD scholarship’s dependence on European and American research. The paper develops a holistic framework to address the fast-changing paces and scale of the PD barriers to business sustainability and responsibility thereby broadening the PD and SRB field’s scope and reach. The implications of the contributions on how to structure the circular economy, how businesses conduct operations locally and globally, the nature and impact of sustainability strategies, methodological reform and contract and transactional issues in employment relations are articulated.