José Carlos Marques

Introduction: The Intellectual Crisis of CSR

Turbulent events in the world’s financial, food and energy markets, global recession, as well as the urgency of climate change, growing inequality and persistent poverty, suggest that various features of globalization and economic liberalization are fundamentally flawed. They also starkly contradict the development scenarios of those who had been touting the virtues of self-regulating markets, minimalist states and the capacity of large firms to recast their role in society through ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR). An offshoot of the free market ideology that took hold in the 1980s, CSR matured within the context of the ‘institutional turn’2 of the 1990s, which had both an analytical and a constructivist or normative dimension. The former sought to better understand how institutions affect society and economic performance, as well as how large firms — as organizations — enjoy some autonomy from market forces to pursue their strategic interests. The constructivist dimension was concerned with filling governance gaps and fine-tuning institutions, in particular through so-called voluntary initiatives and ‘private regulation’, in an attempt to minimize certain perverse effects of economic liberalization that affected workers, communities, consumers and the environment. Such effects increasingly threatened the legitimacy of big business as well as the dominant ideology underpinning the rise of corporate power, namely neoliberalism. CSR, then, sought to address new challenges for business associated with risk, uncertainty and complexity. However, it did so in a way that was as much about sustaining core features of contemporary, corporate-led capitalism as improving corporations’ social and environmental performance.

Introduction: Understanding Business Power and Public Policy in a Development Context

Global trends and events in recent years — growing inequality, persistent poverty, climate change, food insecurity and the financial and economic crisis of 2008–9 — have called into question the development credentials and viability of a model of liberal capitalism that has been promoted by Northern governments and international financial institutions (IFIs), as well as business elites and technocrats from both the North and South. Core features of this model generated perverse distributional and social effects, particularly for developing countries. These included a low propensity for employment generation and decent work, the casualization of labour, the privatization of basic public services, financialization and a focus on short-term profitability and shareholder returns, economic concentration and the crowding out of smaller producers and enterprises, and the unlevel playing field for trade and investment that favoured some countries and business interests, and constrained others. Most problematic from the perspective adopted in this volume, however, are the rolling back of certain state functions and capacities, the residual status accorded to social policy and the disregard for power imbalances.

Private Regulatory Strategies: Theory and Evidence from the Global Apparel Industry

Despite considerable theory on the democratic and problem-solving merit of multi- stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), business-led initiatives (BLIs) have become prominent private regulatory organizati...