CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains
JENNIFER BAIR* AND FLORENCE PALPACUER† *
Department of Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
[email protected] †
Institute of Enterprise Management, University of Montpellier, France
Abstract The frontier of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is constantly being negotiated by corporate and non-corporate actors that vie to define its meaning and scope. In this article, we explore the relationship between CSR and governance in the context of global value chains that span both organizational boundaries and geographic borders. We draw on the CSR and global value chain literature to highlight the nexus between CSR and what we see as two overlapping dimensions of governance. These are industrial governance (or the coordination of relationships among actors in a global value chain) and global governance (the efforts of non-state actors to manage transnational processes, including via the creation of norms and rules regarding global production). Drawing inspiration from an emergent neo-Gramscian perspective on global value chains, we propose the notion of contested governance to explain how CSR becomes a key domain in which these contending, though potentially complementary, ways of defining and delimiting governance as an analytic concept play out. Keywords GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS, GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, INDUSTRIAL GOVERNANCE, CSR, CIVIL SOCIETY
Given its multiple meanings, scholars employing the term ‘governance’ increasingly find it necessary to modify the concept with an adjective that clarifies the level of analysis or the substantive area they wish to interrogate. At the organizational level, corporate governance refers to the rules and practices by which the firm is directed and controlled internally, while firms, as well as other organizations, are subject to external market governance, or the ‘institutions, governmental and non-governmental, that both enable and constrain the behaviour of markets and market actors’ (Gereffi and Mayer 2005). As productive activities become more spatially dispersed and more frequently divided between multiple firms, industrial governance is required to coordinate the inter-organizational dynamics of these so-called global value chains. According to some observers, the globalization of production, finance, trade and investment has Global Networks 15, supplemental issue (2015) S1–S19. © 2015 The Author(s) Global Networks © 2015 Global Networks Partnership & John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer proceeded at so brisk a pace that the regulatory capacities of national governments and the international institutions inherited from the Bretton Woods era are no longer able to cope. In the absence of a supranational rule of law analogous to that of domestic legal regimes, this outpacing of political regulation by economic forces has resulted in a socalled governance gap (Kobrin 2008; Simons and Macklin 2014) or governance deficit (Haas 2004; Lamy 2013). How this gap is being filled, and by whom, is the domain of those studying global governance. Chief among the non-state actors argued to be playing an increasingly prominent role in global governance is the corporation – specifically, the multinational corporation (MNC). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the governance gap – created, in part, by the growing power and scope of corporations vis-à-vis governments – is itself being filled by corporations under the rubric of ‘private governance’. Perhaps the most widely noted and closely studied form of private governance is corporate social responsibility (CSR). While this concept is far from novel (Carroll 1999; Ireland and Pillay 2010), over the past several decades CSR has not only become a recognized domain of organizational expertise, with staff and resources allocated to it within virtually every major corporation; it has also evolved into a veritable industry and academic field in its own right. This article, and the special issue of Global Networks it introduces, explores the relationship between CSR and governance in the context of globalized production systems. The articles gathered here range widely across different geographical and industrial contexts, from mining in Australia and farming in India, to security guards in South Africa and garment workers in Indonesia. Yet, what unifies this collection is a shared interest in demonstrating how debates surrounding the content, scope and effectiveness of CSR reveal a process of contested governance between corporations and non-corporate actors, all of whom are vying to define the social responsibilities of corporations. As guest editors, we were particularly interested in work that highlighted the nexus between CSR and what we see as two overlapping dimensions of governance. These are industrial governance (the coordination of relationships among the actors in a global value chain) and global governance (the efforts of non-state actors to manage transnational processes, including via the creation of norms and rules regarding global production). The extant literature contains many examples of the connection between these forms of governance, perhaps most notably research on international standards regimes (Nadvi 2008; Ponte and Gibbon 2005). However, their relationship to CSR has to date been insufficiently interrogated. By proposing the notion of contested governance, we aim to highlight how CSR becomes a domain in which these contending, though potentially complementary, ways of defining and delimiting governance as an analytic concept play out. In what follows, we first review two relevant literatures to locate our intervention: that on governance in global value chains, and that on global CSR. We then introduce an emergent neo-Gramscian perspective on global value chains, which we believe is particularly well suited to making sense of the relationship between CSR and the dynamics of contested governance in global industries. Finally, we turn to a summary and discussion of the articles that follow this introduction. We elaborate how this
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains collection makes visible the often opaque and understudied organizational processes by which lead firms mobilize CSR as a tool for generating consent from a variety of stakeholders – ranging from local communities affected by extractive activities to consumers wary of buying ‘sweatshop’ products made in the factories of developing countries. Such efforts have the twin objective of promoting or maintaining an ethical image for the corporation, and, by absorbing criticism from the corporation’s challengers, of forestalling potentially more radical alternatives. Yet, several of the articles also reveal this to be an evolving and incomplete process; various groups of stakeholders, including NGOs, labour unions and local community groups, persist in challenging corporate control over the global value chain. Via their activism, organizing efforts and interventions, such actors are in effect aiming to transform governance in ways that reshape the distribution of risk and reward along the chain. Global value chains, global production networks and industrial governance Most broadly, the term governance refers to the explicit or implicit ‘rules of the game’ that enable and constrain domains of behaviour and the ability of particular actors to set and/or enforce them, either via formal authority relations or through other forms of power. Although discussions of governance may encompass both public and private actors, many define it more narrowly as the ability of non-state actors to set or enforce rules, thus differentiating it from the realm of government by public officials and state institutions. Governance is a prominent theme in discussions of globalization, both because some think that globalization renders government-made formal rules of the game ineffective or irrelevant, and because it creates novel conceptions of control in which private actors have an expanded role. Research on global value chains contains perhaps the most extensive discussions of the relationship between globalization and governance. Specifically, industrial governance refers to (1) how exchanges between actors at different links in a chain are coordinated; (2) who among the participants in the chain is able to define and/or control the process of coordination; and (3) what the consequences are of these coordinating activities for chain participants in terms of the distribution of risk and reward. In one of the first contributions to the literature on what were then called global commodity chains, Gereffi (1994) distinguished between buyer-driven and producerdriven chains. The point of this typology was to contrast the governing role of vertically integrated multinational corporations in sectors such as automobiles, with the governing role of retailers in far-flung subcontracting networks for products such as apparel, toys and footwear. In both cases, particular chain participants are in a position to ‘govern’ by making decisions about which actors can access the chain, how to divide tasks among them, and how to appropriate or distribute the value that is created. However, in the case of buyer-driven chains, control depends not on ownership or authority relations within the firm, but rather on asymmetrical bargaining power between organizations. In this original formulation of governance, the criterion for differentiating between buyer- and producer-driven chains was who had the power to control the allocation of
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer activities and the distribution of value along the chain. However, subsequent literature has shifted towards a concern with specifying how governance is exercised, and why it takes the form it does in a particular case (Dolan and Humphrey 2001; Gibbon and Ponte 2005; Gibbon et al. 2008; Mahutga 2012). Particularly influential is the theory of global value chain governance proposed by Gereffi et al. (2005), which identifies three industry- and production-related variables that, in combination, produce five ways of coordinating exchange between links in a value chain – market transaction, relational network, modular network, captive network and hierarchy. To the degree that scholars of global value chains (or global commodity chains) have assumed governance to be a function of variables internal to the chain – namely the firm’s characteristics or the nature of the production process – they have come in for criticism by advocates of a closely related perspective. Proponents of the global production networks (GPN) framework have articulated two principal objections to the GVC framework. These are, first, its excessive linearity (hence, the preference among GPN scholars for the ‘network’ metaphor over the chain terminology) and, second, its neglect of the broader environments in which value-adding activities are performed, and the consequences of these environments for local development outcomes (Coe et al. 2008; Henderson et al. 2002). To be sure, GVC analysts acknowledge that such environments, or what they call ‘institutional context’, ‘can and do have profound effects on value chain governance’ (Gereffi et al. 2005: 99), but they have focused their attention more on inter-organizational dynamics along the chain than on the role of forces ‘external to the chain’ (Sturgeon 2009). From the vantage point of the GPN framework, the result of these analytical choices is a ‘de-territorialized’ approach to globalization. This neglects the efforts of non-firm actors, including states, to influence how firms organize their activities within in and across borders, and how they interact with other firms (Bowen and Gaytan 2012; Dicken et al. 2001; Neilson and Pritchard 2009; Yeung 2013). In our view, the distinction between the GVC and GPN approaches as theoretical frameworks is overdrawn and its implications for empirical work overstated. We are not the first to make this observation; David Levy (2008: 951) made a similar point in noting that, despite its ‘lofty ambitions, most of the studies spawned by the GPN framework to date are, in practice, very similar to those generated using GCC analysis. Much of the discussion concerns market power and consequent rents due to firm-level expertise and skills in coordinating complex networks.’ In the years since Levy’s analysis of the GVC and GPN literature, the differences between them have, if anything, become less pronounced; in part this is driven by shared substantive concerns among GVC and GPN scholars with specific issues, such as economic and social upgrading (Barrientos et al. 2012; cf. Selwyn 2013). However, it is also possible to observe a certain convergence in the way that key authors in both camps are approaching questions of governance. On the one hand, in their recent work Yeung and Coe would seem to move the GPN camp towards something like the 2005 theory of GVC governance. In ‘reframing the existing GPN–GVC debates’ in favour of a theory ‘focusing on the structural competitive dynamics and actor-specific strategies shaping … networks and their organizational configurations
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains within and across different industries and localities’, Yeung and Coe (2015: 32), like Gereffi et al. (2005), propose three independent variables to explain the organization of productive activities in the global economy. The analytical architecture of their model and the nature of the three variables they specify – optimizing cost-capability ratios, market imperatives and financial disciplines – further suggest something of a shift on the part of these GPN proponents towards a deductive approach focusing on the technomanagerial factors and market contexts shaping firm strategies and (inter-) organizational patterns. Yeung and Coe (2015: 50) nevertheless reaffirm the influence of ‘nonfirm actors, such as the state, international organizations, labor groups, consumers, and civil society organizations’ on global production network dynamics. On the other hand, the convergence towards the GVC and GPN camps reflects a broadened conception of governance on the part of some leading GVC scholars. For example, Ponte and Sturgeon have recently proposed a multi-level model of analysing governance. The first, or ‘micro’ level, refers to the dyadic exchange between two links in the chain; this level is the explanatory focus of the 2005 theory of governance developed by Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon. The second, or ‘meso’, level of analysis asks whether and/or how the type of coordination occurring at a focal link in the chain affects the transactions occurring immediately upstream or downstream. The final, ‘macro’ level of analysis aims to capture the composite power dynamic of a chain. Ponte and Sturgeon (2014: 215) introduce the notion of ‘polarity’ as a way to capture governance at this level: ‘Multipolar’ chains are different from ‘markets’ as they are strongly shaped by the explicit strategic actions of powerful actors (both inside and outside the chain), even if they exhibit multiple foci of power and various kinds of linkages. … A focus on polarity, ranging from unipolar to multipolar governance, allows the construction of a plurality of drivers and of driving mechanisms that go beyond the well-established dichotomy between buyer- and producer-driven governance. This plurality acknowledges that not only firms, but also other actors such as standard-setting bodies, international NGOs, social movements, certification agencies, labour unions and consumer associations can have a bearing on GVC governance. In short, although advocates of the GPN approach and others criticized the conception of governance offered in the literature on GVCs for focusing too narrowly on economic coordination and largely neglecting the broader institutions and discursive structures in which markets are embedded (Levy 2008; Palpacuer 2008), we now see a growing consensus among scholars of global production around another proposition. This is that non-firm actors influence how chains are governed, though their influence will likely differ depending on the type of actor and the context in question. It is a paradox, then, that the question of how power and relations of force between firm and non-firm actors shape industrial governance has not been more squarely addressed in this recent literature, despite the central place given to structural power analysis in early renderings of the rise of global chains (see Bair 2005).
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer CSR and global governance The large and growing literature on CSR is marked by a fault line between ‘internalist’ or ‘instrumental’ views of CSR, and those that see CSR as the product of external forces acting on organizations (Tsutsui and Lim 2015). This debate is loosely analogous to the one described above regarding the determinants of industrial governance in global value chains. For those taking the first approach, the question is what organizationallevel factors explain why and how CSR policies are developed, and what are the effects of such policies on organizational outcomes? Some of these scholars see a strong affinity between ‘doing good’ and ‘doing well’ (Chernev and Blair 2015). Being attentive to the concerns and interests of consumers can be a source of competitive advantage that creates ‘shared value’ (Porter and Kramer 2006), reconciling the financial, ecological and social dimensions of a firm’s performance into a seamless triple bottom line (Elkington 1994). To be sure, not all research proceeding from the internalist/instrumentalist perspective finds empirical support for the claim that there is a business case for CSR; disagreements abound about the nature, size and, indeed, very existence of a ‘market for virtue’ (Vogel 2005). But, what orients this approach is an analytical interest in the relationship – positive, negative or neutral – between CSR activities and organizational, particularly financial, performance (Margolis and Walsh 2003). For those approaching CSR from an external/environmental perspective, the analytical focus is on how CSR practices are shaped by the broader contexts within which firms operate – that is, the ways in which different institutional environments shape societal demands and the expectations placed on corporate actors, as well as the ways in which organizations respond to these pressures (Campbell 2007). The characteristics of the domestic political economy (Kang and Moon 2012), or the variety of capitalism prevailing at the national level (Bair and Palpacuer 2012), is one factor that has been shown to shape CSR activity, while other research on CSR privileges global dynamics. Meyer et al. (2015) argue that CSR arose as a way to ‘legitimate the multinational corporation in a stateless world’, its institutional diffusion across countries reflecting a broader process of structuration in an emergent world society. Others emphasize the role of civil society actors, particularly NGOs, both in criticizing corporate behaviour and in proposing particular reforms or solutions to the problems their activism casts into relief (Bartley 2003; Rodríguez-Garavito 2005; Schurman and Munro 2009). Tsutsui and Lim (2015: 3) are broadly representative of much of the work in this vein when they argue that: CSR developed as a result of efforts by various social actors to monitor and control the consequences of corporate and economic activities. We posit that external pressures exerted by trade and investment relationships, government actions, social movement activism, and taken-for-granted models of appropriate organizational behavior work at both global and national levels to push corporations to engage in, co-opt, or react against CSR activities.
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains Within the broad consensus that CSR is a process shaped by forces external to the firm, there is a plurality of views about the precise ways in which this is occurring and with what effects. Stakeholder theory provides one way to understand the range of actors to which the firm is or ought to be oriented. Maignan and Ferrell (2000: 284), for example, are among the authors who put stakeholders at the very centre of their conceptualization, defining CSR as ‘the extent to which businesses meet the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary responsibilities imposed on them by their stakeholders’. According to the stakeholder view of CSR, then, stakeholders ought to determine what a corporation’s social responsibilities are and, presumably, evaluate the degree to which these are being fulfilled (Freeman and Velamuri 2008; Jamali 2008). Yet, the task of identifying stakeholders and assessing what they want from business may become increasingly complex when corporations organize much of their activity via the farflung subcontracting relationships and supply chains described in the GVC literature. Davis et al. (2008) cast in such terms the crux of the problem: ‘at a time when more stakeholders than ever are calling them to account, firms have but a foggy notion of what, exactly, their obligations are.’ That ‘people hold firms responsible for actions far beyond their boundaries, including the actions of suppliers, distributors, alliance partners, and even sovereign nations’, suggests that a distinctly global CSR regime is emerging. In short, when the geographical scope and organizational complexity of modern business increases, the set of stakeholders to which corporations are held responsible similarly grows (also Bair and Palpacuer 2015). As the number and diversity of stakeholders expand, so too does the probability that they will have distinct, and potentially competing, ideas about the responsibilities of business – a problem that stakeholder theory may be insufficient to address. Scherer and Palazzo, for their part, take issue with what they regard as stakeholder theory’s instrumental attitude towards stakeholders. Though this approach to CSR acknowledges the interests of actors external to the firm, ‘stakeholders are considered in decision making only in as much as they are powerful and able to influence the profit of the corporation’ (Scherer and Palazzo 2011: 904). These authors, by contrast, propose a model of ‘political CSR’ that starts from the premise that globalization has created a range of novel challenges that national governments cannot meet. The gap between the kind of governance needed and the kind that the state can presently provide is being filled via ‘the intensified engagement of private actors, social movements, and the growing activities of international institutions’. As a result, a ‘new form of transnational regulation is emerging: global governance, the definition and implementation of standards of behaviour with global reach’ (Scherer and Palazzo 2011: 909; emphasis in original). Scherer and Palazzo’s (2011: 901) definition of political CSR thus explicitly recognizes CSR as a form of global governance: ‘political CSR suggests an extended model of governance with business firms contributing to global regulation and providing public goods. It goes beyond the instrumental view on politics in order to develop a new understanding of global politics where private actors such as corporations and civil society organizations play an active role in the democratic regulation and control of market transactions.’
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer While Scherer and Palazzo share our understanding of CSR as a form of governance, their conceptualization of political CSR leaves little room for its theorization as a contested process. Indeed, their formulation of political CSR operates with a strikingly underdeveloped conceptualization of the politics of the ‘CSR movement [as] a discursive and material struggle about business practice’ (Ougaard 2006: 236; also Néron 2010). Scherer and Palazzo list ‘NGO pressure’ alongside the desire to ‘close gaps in regulation, and to reduce complexity’ among the factors that encourage business ‘to compensate [for] the gaps in national governance by voluntarily contributing to selfregulation and by producing public goods’ (Scherer and Palazzo 2011: 903). However, the kinds of practices and policies that follow from these diverse motivations are likely to differ, possibly substantially. Other authors have also gestured towards the concept of CSR as a form of governance, though to the degree that they see CSR as a phenomenon elicited largely by external pressure, they may place more emphasis than do Scherer and Palazzo on the role of NGOs and other civil society groups in explaining these developments. Karl Polanyi’s (1944) work has influenced a number of scholars in this field insofar as they see CSR as the outcome of a protective counter movement that emerges in response to the dislocations and deprivations caused by a disembedded ‘market society’. CSR thus becomes a mechanism for the social regulation of the market, and a way to reembed corporate power within global civil society (Tsutsui and Lim 2015; Utting 2005). Compared with Scherer and Palazzo’s formulation of political CSR, the Polanyian interpretation puts less emphasis on the corporation’s ability to self-regulate, or on the proclivity of market actors to provide public goods. Instead, CSR results from a societal backlash against the externalities and excesses of corporate power. Yet, where a Polanyian perspective might suggest that CSR is an outcome of contestation, or a kind of negotiated truce between corporations and their critics, we see it as an ongoing process of contestation about the role of business and society. This view of CSR as contested governance is most closely related to Levy’s neo-Gramscian perspective on global production networks (Levy 2008; Levy and Kaplan 2008). While Levy (2008: 954) applies the neo-Gramscian lens to the field of GPNs to reveal them as ‘integrated economic, political, and discursive structures with a degree of structural stability’, we find this approach particularly relevant for looking specifically at CSR within GVCs or GPNs. As the primary terrain of contestation over the nature of corporate power, CSR is a particularly illuminating domain through which to see the production of hegemonic stability in the global economy. CSR as contested governance: insights from the special issue In editing this special issue, our goal was to advance a critical perspective on the development of CSR in the context of global value chains. Although we aimed for a collection that would be coherent and topical, we imposed no theoretical litmus test or analytical paradigm in the call for articles. For this reason, we were somewhat surprised to see that virtually every submission we received (including the five selected for this
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains issue) cited Levy’s (2008) Academy of Management Review paper elaborating the neo-Gramscian view of GPNs. Although we do not presume that each of these authors actively identifies with or fully endorses the neo-Gramscian approach to CSR, we believe this shared reference provides some indication of how generative the neoGramscian perspective is for interpreting CSR developments in a highly diverse set of geographic contexts and industry cases. The neo-Gramscian approach proposed by Levy (2008) posits that firms, governments and civil society actors are engaged in continuous struggles over the governance of GPNs, and gives to such relations of force a central role in explaining the economic and political contours of global production. A neo-Gramscian perspective not only acknowledges the role of non-firm actors in the governance of global production, but also further suggests that governance be seen in the context of a broader hegemonic project. Gramsci (1971) used the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the relative stability of a social order organized on the basis of asymmetrical relationships between a dominant alliance of economic, state and civil society actors, and subordinate groups that are accommodated into this social order. As David Levy (2008: 951) elaborated, the neo-Gramscian notion of hegemonic stability in GPNs illuminates the process by which actors grant consent, at least contingently, to a set of arrangements where authority and rewards are distributed asymmetrically; the contingency of hegemony points to the potential for strategic agents to challenge GPNs and highlights the political nature of ensuing contestation. Despite the potential of this generative framework, there has been limited empirical research to date demonstrating how this process works – that is, documenting the actual organizational processes by which such stability is both contested and maintained. By unpacking the discursive and material practices by which global value chains are governed, the articles collected here begin to suggest how relations of control and coordination between firms along the chain – that is industrial governance – can become centrally implicated in debates about the corporation in global civil society – that is its role in global governance. Hence, CSR is a particularly fruitful lens through which to consider how the tension between these forms of governance is expressed in and through global value chains. Two overarching, interrelated findings emerge from the collection as a whole. First, the articles show that CSR serves as a vehicle through which lead firms attempt to maintain their hegemony vis-à-vis other actors in the value chain, including by absorbing (or even anticipating) criticism from community and/or civil society groups. Second, close analyses reveal this to be an ongoing and processual struggle in which corporations and their critics iteratively develop, evaluate, criticize and revise CSR policies and practices. In this way, CSR becomes an integral component of the governance of global value chains by corporations, but this governance is never a fait accompli because a variety of non-firm actors are continually developing new arguments and tactics to contest and/or transform it. Specifically, the five articles
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer following this introduction show how trade unions, non-governmental organizations and community groups aim to influence how and where corporations do business, including how they distribute the risks and returns to productive activities along the global value chain. In ‘A social licence to operate: corporate social responsibility, local communities, and the constitution of global production networks’, Robyn Mayes examines the central place of CSR strategies in the global production network of the multinational mining corporation, BHP Billiton. Because the geography of mining is dependent on the geological distribution of minerals, and because mining generally requires large-scale investment, these ‘producer-driven’ chains vary in important ways from the buyerdriven chains for apparel and other light manufactures that have been the focus of much research on both global value chains and CSR. Most notably, upstream segments of the chain are less mobile in producer-driven than in buyer-driven industries, and large lead firms directly control rather than outsource extractive activities. In response to growing societal concerns and local resistance to the social and environmental consequences of mining, companies in this sector have made significant investments in community outreach. Indeed, in this industry CSR is seen as a means to the end of a ‘social licence to operate’ (SLO) – a term that not only underlines the obligations of companies towards stakeholders, but also appears to recognize civil society as the ultimate arbiter capable of granting (or presumably, denying) such a licence. In her article, Mayes examines the process by which BHP Billiton attempted to secure an SLO from a community in Western Australia occupying the site of a nickel mine. Representing an investment by BHB Billiton of US$ 2.1 billion, the Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation had a transformative impact on its host community. Foreseeing the changes that the mine would bring to this rural area, the company fostered the creation of a local stakeholder group that was to serve as an interlocutor between the community and the company. Mayes’s case study shows precisely how corporations can use CSR to anticipate, absorb and possibly even prevent resistance. She demonstrates that the community groups the company supported were enrolled in the broader network of the firm’s CSR efforts, and served not only to legitimate the mine, but also to pre-empt or co-opt local activists or government officials who might challenge the company’s hegemony over the region’s political economy. Drawing on a rich body of ethnographic data, including more than 100 interviews with corporate officials, members of the community groups and local activists, Mayes examines how the company’s CSR practices enabled it to shape the social and political contexts surrounding the mine. They did this in ways that not only facilitated the company’s local operations, but also positioned the Ravensthorpe operation within BHP Billiton’s global network of mine operations and the broad ‘alliance of communities benefited by and consenting to global mining’. Within the broader context of BHB Billiton’s global production network, ‘local communities and places were mobilised to extend the firm’s business goals and potentially its competitive position in relation to future access to nickel reserves, either in sites in Australia or further afield, by virtue of the company’s reputation.’ Thus, Mayes suggests that, in attempting to secure a social licence to operate from the local community, BHP Billiton is both looking ahead to the
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains next community from which it will need such a licence to establish a new mine, and looking outward to the investors and other stakeholders towards whom BHP Billiton directs its annual CSR reports. Mayes finds little evidence that the residents of Ravensthorpe themselves have found engagement with the company’s CSR programmes a route to effective representation or resolution of community concerns. Although she reports plenty of local frustration with BHP Billiton, her informants nevertheless articulate a grudging consent to the corporation’s presence. At the same time, the local population’s dissatisfaction and sense of co-optation may point in the direction of future struggles. The article by Steffen Böhm, Vinicius Brei and Siddhartha Dabhi, ‘EDF Energy’s green CSR claims examined: the follies of global carbon commodity chains’, provides another example of how a corporation endeavours to accommodate public demand for more socially responsible business practices. It does so to sustain its social legitimacy – in this case through the formation of a new type of ‘sustainability value chain’, which arises from the market for reducing carbon emissions. The authors focus on EDF Energy, the British subsidiary of Electricité de France SA, a French multinational that is among the world’s largest producers of energy. EDF Energy has been particularly proactive in constructing an image of environmental responsibility, exemplified by its status as an official ‘sustainability partner’ for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. However, as they interrogate the ‘greening’ of EDF Energy, the authors find that the basis for the company’s sustainability claims is its participation in a carbon emissions trading scheme. Specifically, EDF Energy purchases carbon offsets from an Indian company, Gujarat Fluorochemicals Limited (GFL). Böhm, Brei and Dabhi examine the relationship between EDF Energy and GFL as a kind of sustainability supply chain; they note that EDF bases its claims to environmental responsibility not on changes to that company’s own production practices, but rather on its connection to GFL and its participation in the clean development mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol. In essence, EDF’s claims to sustainability and therefore its status as a corporate citizen is premised on its ability to govern what these authors call the carbon commodity chain, which links it to GFL as a supplier of sustainability. Furthermore, GFL’s own record of environmental performance is spotty, at best. The authors draw on fieldwork conducted in Gujarat, India to outline a long history of strained relations between the company and local communities, many of whose residents claim that the pollution emitted from the plant has a negative impact on their health and harms local agriculture. Thus, at the same time that EDF Energy is aggressively marketing itself to European stakeholders as a leader in the field of environmental CSR, stakeholders at another link in this carbon commodity chain are calling attention to the need for more sustainable practices by the very company on which EDF Energy’s sustainability claims depend. By tracing the global carbon chain from London to Gujarat, Böhm, Brei and Dabhei reveal the multiple discursive, organizational and spatial scales implicated in EDF’s ‘green makeover’ and, in so doing, demonstrate how global CSR schemes can reproduce rather than mitigate global environmental and social inequalities. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that the local villagers who live near the GFL plant are contesting this effort to govern via
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer CSR. To the extent that activists in these communities are able to forge their own global connections to civil society groups elsewhere, perhaps via transnational advocacy networks, their local protest may create pressure for EDF to revisit its CSR claims around sustainability. Such networks have played a critical role in driving CSR strategies in buyer-driven chains. In ‘Responsibility and neglect in global production networks: the uneven significance of codes of conduct in Indonesian factories’, Tim Bartley and Niklas EgelsZandén weigh on one of the most widely debated CSR strategies – corporate codes of conduct. The development and implementation of such codes followed a period of antisweatshop activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Student groups, labour unions and a variety of NGOs, outraged by revelations of child labour and worker abuses in export factories in developing countries, called on the brands and retailers that purchase these products to accept responsibility for problems in the supply chain. They also called on them to implement desired changes, such as higher wages or improved working conditions in contract factories (Bair and Palpacuer 2012; Bartley 2003). Codes of conduct and auditing regimes emerged as the standard response to such criticisms and they quickly diffused, first among clothing companies and then to other industries. Two decades on from the development of the supply chain auditing model, there is an active debate about the degree to which codes of conduct can be used to improve employment practices and labour outcomes in the supplier factories comprising global value chains for light manufactures (Anner 2012; Locke et al. 2007). Bartley and EgelsZandén report results from a comprehensive study carefully designed to assess the impact of codes of conduct in Indonesian factories producing apparel, footwear and electronics. In this study, they compare factories producing for foreign clients that have codes of conduct with exporting firms not subject to such codes, and factories serving the domestic market. They also compare the effects of buyers’ codes of conduct with the public inspections carried out by the government labour department. They find that, while codes of conduct have a significant impact on compliance in particular areas, such as health and safety, their effects in other domains are modest (employment practices such as wage and hour violations) or negligible (associational rights). These results are largely consistent with a neo-Gramscian view of CSR in global value chains. They show that codes have no effect on areas that might more strongly empower workers vis-à-vis management, such as freedom of association and collective bargaining. However, they have an impact on issues that are particularly sensitive to consumer concern and/or that are possible to implement in cost-effective ways without challenging managerial control, such as some aspects of worker health and safety. By contrast, they find that government inspection more strongly affects compliance with standards regarding employment practices (for example, use of contract workers) than codes of conduct. Overall, their conclusions suggest that, as a CSR strategy, codes of conduct enable corporations to respond to consumer demands in ways that simultaneously legitimate their position as responsible corporate citizens and buttress their position as lead firms in buyer-driven chains. This is a particularly clear example of the way in which industrial governance and global governance intersect via CSR. Yet, by comparing the
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains outcomes of private regulation via codes of conduct with public regulation via labour inspection, Bartley and Egels-Zandén also highlight the continuing role of domestic governments in regulating labour conditions in global value chains. Against the backdrop of a trend that many describe as the ‘privatization of governance’, these authors point out that public actors continue to play a role in the governance of GVCs, and their findings suggest that such efforts yield distinct, though potentially complementary, results to those secured by private governance alone. Andre Nickow’s article, ‘Growing in value: NGOs, social movements and the cultivation of developmental value chains in Uttarakhand, India’, underlines the variety of roles that CSR protagonists may adopt in seeking to alter the governance of GVCs. He examines how local NGOs in India support farmers by helping them to exploit market niches, targeting not only those created by global buyers who adopt socially responsible procurement practices in GVCs, but also alternative ecological chains that are cast as a route to emancipation from lead firm-governed GVCs. From data collected via fieldwork in Uttarakhand, an Indian state with a lively activist community dedicated to ecological and sustainability issues, Nickow identifies three strategies that local organizations use to support marginal producers. These are (1) building the organizational and technical capacity of small-scale producers; (2) helping rural producers meet the standards required to access the global value chains that food retailers coordinate; and (3) developing alternative value chains, for example by valorizing and promoting crops for their social, cultural and environmental characteristics. Nickow describes the first two strategies as a kind of ‘matching’: by better aligning the activities of local farmers with the sourcing priorities of buyers, they help give credence to the claims of lead firms that procurement policies targeting small producers are a form of CSR. For example, helping farmers organize into cooperatives enables small-scale producers to pool output so that they can meet the volume requirements of buyers; assisting farmers to meet the product and process criteria established by lead firms enables small producers to overcome the barrier to entry that such standards represent, thus enabling them to access new markets. Insofar as these approaches reinforce the governance dynamics established by lead firms via CSR, they represent a cooperative rather than confrontational attitude on the part of NGOs towards dominant economic actors. However, the last of the three strategies goes beyond facilitating the incorporation of local producers into buyer-driven value chains. Instead of supporting existing governance dynamics, some NGOs endeavour to create alternative value chains that allow producers to capture more value while also generating better ecological outcomes. By stimulating demand from local buyers for non-conventional products, grassroots movements seek to valorize the non-material or extra-economic attributes of these crops, thus defying the price-sensitive logic of most buyer-driven chains and potentially circumventing the role of retailers as market gatekeepers. Nickow’s research thus extends earlier work applying convention theory to value chain governance (Ponte and Gibbon 2005) by demonstrating how stakeholders are actively seeking to shape the qualities that define products as socially responsible and, they hope, desirable to
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer consumers. Nickow cautions that we should be wary of overstating the extent to which NGO strategies ‘that legitimate corporate practices are separated from efforts to more fundamentally undermine corporate dominance of value chains’. The civil society groups that Nickow studies intervene in value chains in multiple ways; while some of these activities may reinforce the existing governance structure for agricultural value chains, others contest that governance by seeking to develop alternative non-corporatedriven chains. The final article in the collection by Michael Fichter and Jamie McCallum also examines the strategies of non-firm actors – here, labour unions – as they engage the CSR efforts of corporations. In ‘Implementing global framework agreements: the limits of social partnership’, the authors ask how and with what effects global union federations are using global framework agreements to promote workers’ rights in global value chains. Global framework agreements (GFA) are instruments signed by a global union federation and a multinational corporation. Their ambiguous status within the realm of CSR makes them particularly useful for exploring the theme of contested governance. On the one hand, GFAs are negotiated and, as such, they institutionalize the participation of stakeholders, specifically international trade union federations, in formulating a company’s labour policies and securing conditions favourable to workers’ rights in the company’s production activities. The obligations outlined in GFAs do not necessarily apply only to the employees of the signatory company; under these agreements, multinationals may also accept responsibility for conditions along their supply chain, as when a company agrees to monitor or enforce certain standards in the factories of its suppliers or subcontractors. In this way, GFAs recognize a role for organized labour in the governance of the value chain and exemplify the shifting nature of CSR as a phenomenon that is extending beyond the corporation – both in terms of who has input into the process and who is affected by the outcome. On the other hand, GFAs are not collectively bargained contracts and the local unions that represent the workers employed by the multinational corporation and its subsidiaries are not signatories of the agreement. Hence, the firm retains significant leverage in promoting and implementing these agreements in ways that acknowledge a symbolic rather than a concrete role for labour unions as counter-powers on the ground. In their article, Fichter and McCallum explore the consequences of this ambiguity by mobilizing the dual notion of ‘social partnership’ and ‘conflict partnership’ to explain the variable achievements of GFAs. First, drawing on a sample of GFAs signed by European corporations, they underline the ways in which firms may reabsorb these agreements into their unilateral CSR policy. In this scenario, GFAs fail to empower the local workers and union representatives they are designed to protect in the first place. Indeed, these stakeholders are typically unaware of the existence of an agreement that was signed at corporate headquarters by the leadership of a distant GUF – a situation similar to that observed in many empirical studies of codes of conduct (Egels-Zandén and Merk 2014; Esbenshade 2004; Rodríguez-Garavito 2005). Fichter and McCallum attribute this lack of effectiveness to the ‘social partnership’ approach that some GUFs use to negotiate global agreements in an ‘atmosphere of familiarity’. The authors contrast this model of ‘social partnership’ with the dynamic that
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CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains prevails in a case study that focuses on GFAs signed by UNI, the global union federation in the private services sector, and several corporations such as Manpower, Sodexo and Securitas. Examining how these agreements are playing out on the ground in India, South Africa, Brazil and the United States, Fichter and McCallum observe that GFAs can sometimes play an effective role in leveraging improvements in workers’ rights and labour conditions. This is more likely to occur when unions adopt an approach of ‘conflict partnership’ in the pursuit of a GFA ‘because workers must necessarily be organized to play a role first in winning the GFA and then ensuring it is fully implemented throughout the corporate network’. Hence, the varied capacity and willingness of trade unions to enter into relations of force with corporations is seen as a major condition for the effectiveness of a GFA to create an opening for shared governance of work and employment conditions in GVCs, again underlining the contested nature of CSR as a channel for value chain governance. Collectively, the articles in this collection demonstrate how stakeholders attempt, with varying degrees of success, to highlight the consequences of current governance practices in value chains and to secure changes in those practices. As the dominant corporate response to such challenges, CSR becomes the primary terrain on which these political struggles over governance occur. The contributions of Nickow, Egels-Zandén and Bartley, and Fichter and McCallum suggest that social actors are finding ways – albeit partial and uneven ones – to leverage corporate social responsibility, and the diverse organizational practices encompassed by that term, to shift the governance of value chains towards improving outcomes for participants. In contrast, the analyses of Mayes and of Böhm et al. emphasize the degree to which lead firms have largely succeeded in shaping the discursive terrain on which this struggle occurs, mobilizing the rhetoric and tools of CSR to maintain their control over the governance of the chain. From this perspective, CSR works to absorb and diffuse social contestation and political contention. In so doing, it blunts civil society challenges that might otherwise entail a shift in the power from lead firms to other actors in global value chains and, consequently, a transfer of value from dominant towards weaker social actors in the form of increased participation, higher wages, improved working conditions and better environmental outcomes. CSR thus serves a role in the ‘manufacture of consent’ within civil society (Gramsci 1971). It becomes an important element in securing hegemonic stability and the unequal distribution of power and rewards in global value chains. To be sure, this collection suggests that the successful contestation of governance in global value chains – that is, challenging corporate practices in ways that have meaningful consequences, especially distributional ones, for actors in the chain – is both difficult and rare. Yet, as the concept of contested governance is intended to diagnose, existing value chain dynamics, and the role of corporations within them, are neither static nor secure. Stakeholders, including NGOs, activists, workers and labour unions, international institutions, and local and national governments, are increasingly aware that the CSR domain contains contradictory dynamics that offer opportunities to influence the governance of global value chains through delimited forms of stakeholder participation, while simultaneously circumscribing more fundamental or far-reaching changes in the operation of such chains. Our understanding of CSR at this juncture is advanced by
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Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer analyses that examine how unstable and constantly evolving compromises are emerging between business and civil society under the rubric of corporate social responsibility, especially studies that document, as those collected here do, the concrete practices through which such compromises are forged, stabilized, challenged and transformed. Acknowledgements We have listed the authors’ names in alphabetical order and this is a fully collaborative project. Several of the articles in this collection were first presented at the 2011 meeting of the European Group for Organizational Studies in Gothenburg, Sweden, where we organized a track with Alessia Contu on ‘Transnational social movements and global value chains’. We would like to thank Alessia, the participants in that track, all the authors of the articles collected here, and the editorial team and reviewers of Global Networks.
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