Jette Steen Knudsen

Jette Steen Knudsen

Professor
Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Business

Contact Information

Research/Areas of Interest

My work is interdisciplinary and draws primarily from political science and business in society scholarship. I define my field of research as the government regulation of social welfare. I use the term social welfare to refer to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities but I also consider social welfare to mean employment and training opportunities with a particular focus on low-skilled workers.

Education
  • BS, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, 1988
  • MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, 1995
  • PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, 2001
Biography
Jette Steen Knudsen is Professor of Policy and International Business and holds the Shelby Collum Davis Chair in Sustainability. She is also a Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) with the Center for Corporate Governance and she is affiliated with the CBS Center for Sustainability. Jette has served as President of the Tufts University Faculty Senate 2021-2024. Her research centers on the interface between government regulation and business actions with a particular focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). She studies the ability of governments in economically advanced industrialized nations to promote social change through regulation of social practices of home country multinationals in developing countries. She will be a guest-editor of the Journal of Management Studies on governance of sustainability (to be published in 2025) together with Johanna Järvelä, Jean-Pascal Gond, Gregory Jackson and Jeremy Moon. Her 2017 book (with Jeremy Moon) is titled "Visible Hands: Government Regulation of Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Business" (Cambridge University Press, November 2017). She has published in journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Business and Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Policy and Politics, Political Studies and Regulation and Governance. Knudsens consults on the governance of sustainability for leading companies and international organizations such as the Asian Development Bank. She also contributes to CBS's program on supervisory board management with a focus on sustainability. From 2003-2007 Knudsen headed a government-sponsored think tank, The Copenhagen Centre for CSR. She then served as project leader of a CSR task force for the CEO at Maersk, a shipping, oil and retail conglomerate. Knudsen graduated from MIT in 2001 with a PhD in Political Science.