Xu Kang

Xu Kang is a postdoctoral researcher whose work examines corporate sustainability governance, with particular attention to responsible business conduct and sustainability governance in politically complex contexts. His research investigates how firms, public authorities, and civil society actors interpret, negotiate, and implement sustainability and human-rights expectations across diverse regulatory environments and global value chains. Empirically, his work is internationally oriented: while China remains a core anchor, he also studies European settings, including German and Swedish multinational corporations’ sustainability and human-rights governance and European national human rights institutions’ engagement with business. In the Global South and wider Asia, his research covers cross-sector partnerships in Vietnam, national human rights institutions in India and Southeast Asia, and BHR engagement in East Asia. His ongoing projects further analyse human rights and environmental due diligence in critical raw material supply chains across Latin America (including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru), as well as business-for-peace dynamics in African contexts. His publications include a monograph with Routledge (2025) on corporate responsibility in China, peer-reviewed journal articles on CSR interpretation, human-rights governance, and cross-sector collaboration, and manuscripts under advanced review that extend this agenda to cross-border and Global South governance challenges. Across these studies, he adopts an interdisciplinary approach spanning management and organisation studies, political science, and law. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg and an MSc in Sociology from Lund University.