Farzad Rafi Khan

CSR As Imperialism: Towards a Phenomenological Approach to CSR In the Developing World

The voices of local manufacturers have largely been overlooked in academic and policy debates on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the developing world. This article makes a contribution towards filling this gap in the literature by explicitly taking a phenomenological approach that maps the interpretations given to Western-based CSR initiatives by local manufacturers. Data from two qualitative research projects on CSR initiatives in the soccer ball industry of Sialkot, Pakistan, are utilized to explore this issue in an inductive and exploratory manner. The article suggests that many soccer ball manufacturers in Sialkot perceive CSR as part of the wider historic project of Western imperialism in the developing world through which economic resources are extracted from local manufacturers while their perceptions of what constitutes socially responsible behaviour are delegitimized. This counter-discourse of CSR as Western imperialism paves the way for an alternative reading of CSR that challenges both more management-oriented mainstream conceptions of CSR and more critical contributions to the CSR and development literature. The article suggests that this alternative reading of CSR as Western imperialism may have significant implications for future change management research and practice.

Southern voices in management and organization knowledge

The rationale for this special issue has been to open a space for reflection about management and organizational knowledge (MOK) as it is practiced and constructed in the global South. Organizational scholars working outside the West rarely appear on the radar of the most prestigious scholarly journals of the field, the institutionalized ‘core’ of the management and organizational science. However, there is life beyond Northern academia, both in terms of management theoretical concepts and in terms of organizational practices. This special issue aims to make these voices heard, without any particular commitments to Western theoretical framework or approaches, insofar as the contributions have a critical lens, given the nature of the journal Organization. A detailed mapping of the nature and extent of MOK in the Global South falls clearly beyond the scope of this introduction, but before discussing the particular articles selected and which insights about this special issue topic they generate, we will make a very succinct presentation of the problems involved in the production and diffusion of Southern MOK. Before doing this, we will characterize what we understand as Global South and how this terminology has emerged.

‘I feel like a foreign agent’: NGOs and corporate social responsibility interventions into Third World child labor

A field study focused on a Western-led Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) intervention into Pakistan’s soccer ball industry is used to explore the dynamics surrounding local Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) staff charged with implementation. Those dynamics include the post-colonial conditions pervasive in Third World contexts that frame the perception, interpretation, and reaction to Western interventions. NGO staff must navigate these conditions, which impel them into multiple subject positions and contradictory rationalities resulting in unsatisfactory experiences. Like many Western-led interventions resting on universalistic, paternalistic, de-contextualizing, and atomistic assumptions, this one brought negative unintended consequences. This leads to a suggested reconfiguration of CSR from a post-colonial perspective insistent on an inclusive ‘bottom-up’, ‘reversed engineered’ approach, wherein CSR problems are traced back to Western multinational corporations’ policies and practices.

Story-Branding by Empire Entrepreneurs: Nike, Child Labour, and Pakistan's Soccer Ball Industry

Abstract Our study identifies and calls for an answerability-ethic of storytelling where entrepreneurs areheld responsible and accountable for the harmful ways in which they story the Third World. We study aCorporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative involving Nike in the Third World. Our study draws upon interviewsand textual study of the Sialkot Child Labour Elimination Project that was signed in Atlanta, Georgia inFebruary 1997. We find that Nikes CSR stories not only brand products but they also brand Third World labour. Our studys main contribution is to show that entrepreneurs’ branding through storytelling their “benign” CSRinitiatives in the Third World, an activity we term “story-branding,” has an imperial face requiring the use ofpower to turn workers voiceless (make them into subalterns).

Lenin in Allah’s court: Iqbal’s critique of Western capitalism and the opening up of the postcolonial imagination in critical management studies

One manifestation of the Eurocentrism present in postcolonial critical management studies is its failure to engage with Muslim critiques of Western capitalism on their own terms. In this article we seek to address this deficiency by introducing the thought of Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938)— one of the most influential thinkers in the postcolonial Muslim world. We do a close reading of three of Iqbal’s poems that are considered among his most representative and poignant critical reflections on Western capitalism and its imperialistic presence in the Global South. This close reading generates the major contribution of this article which is an alternative critical narrative on Western capitalism that is characterized by theocentrism and embodied love. We argue that this is a distinct way of critiquing Western capitalism which allows us to better recognize the provincial (i.e. Western) character of postcolonial critical management studies.One manifestation of the Eurocentrism present in postcolonial critical management studies is its failure to engage with Muslim critiques of Western capitalism on their own terms. In this article we seek to address this deficiency by introducing the thought of Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938)— one of the most influential thinkers in the postcolonial Muslim world. We do a close reading of three of Iqbal’s poems that are considered among his most representative and poignant critical reflections on Western capitalism and its imperialistic presence in the Global South. This close reading generates the major contribution of this article which is an alternative critical narrative on Western capitalism that is characterized by theocentrism and embodied love. We argue that this is a distinct way of critiquing Western capitalism which allows us to better recognize the provincial (i.e. Western) character of postcolonial critical management studies.

Situating Core-Peripheral Knowledge in Management and Organisation Studies

Since its emergence in the early 1900s, the discipline of management and organisation studies (MOS) has predominantly relied upon a Euro-American epistemology, presenting managerial and organisational forms developed in the West, or Global North, as exemplars on a path towards modernity for the rest of the world to follow (Calas & Smircich, 1999; Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006; Westwood, 2001). With few (but growing) exceptions, scholars in MOS have adopted this Euro-American outlook in both the centre and the periphery of the system of global management knowledge (Tsui, 2004). In this book, we intend to flip this outlook in order to explore what management and organisation might look like from a peripheral perspective, and how the periphery might write back to the centre of the discipline of MOS. How different would the world of management and organisational theory and practice become when studied from the periphery?

How the West Was Won: The De-institutionalization of Child-Labor in Pakistan's Soccer Ball Industry

Organizational fields in developing countries often experience diffusion of practices that, while novel for them, are highly institutionalized in the West. Studying such instances of change, which involve both non-isomorphic and isomorphic elements, sheds new light on the role of institutional entrepreneurs and highlights the crucial importance of identifying and incorporating the unintended consequences of institutional change into our analyses. Specifically, our study of the campaign to eliminate child labour in Pakistans soccer ball manufacturing industry reveals how institutional entrepreneurs mediated between the powerless and the powerful. It also highlights how, in the wake of this universally acknowledged success story, bigger problems were created for many weak members of the field, especially women.