The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility / Edition 1

by Catherine Dolan, Dinah Rajak

Overview

The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating and addressing key issues such as  the introduction of new forms of management, control, and discipline through ethical and environmental governance or the extent to which corporate responsibility challenges existing patterns of inequality rather than generating new geographies of inclusion and exclusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785330711
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Series:	Dislocations , #18
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dinah Rajak is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. She is the author of In Good Company. An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility (Stanford University Press 2011) and the co-founder of the Centre for New Economies of Development (www.responsiblebop.com).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction Toward the anthropology of corporate social responsibility Catherine Dolan Dinah Rajak 1

Chapter 1 Theatres of virtue: Collaboration, consensus, and the social life of corporate social responsibility Dinah Rajak 29

Chapter 2 Virtuous language in industry and the academy Stuart Kirsch 48

Chapter 3 Re-siting corporate responsibility: The making of South Africa's Avon entrepreneurs Catherine Dolan Mary Johnstone-Louis 67

Chapter 4 Power, inequality, and corporate social responsibility: The politics of ethical compliance in the South Indian garment industry Geert De Neve 86

Chapter 5 Detachment as a corporate ethic: Materializing CSR in the diamond supply chain Jamie Cross 110

Chapter 6 Disconnect development: Imagining partnership and experiencing detachment in Chevron's borderlands Katy Gardner 128

Chapter 7 Subcontracting as corporate social responsibility in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project José-Maria Muñoz Philip Burnham 152

Chapter 8 Collective contradictions of "corporate" environmental conservation Rebecca Hardin 179

Chapter 9 Engineering responsibility: Environmental mitigation and the limits of commensuration in a Chilean mining project Fabiana Li 199

Chapter 10 Global concepts in local contexts: CSR as "anti-politics machine" in the extractive sector in Ghana and Peru Johanna Sydow 217

Afterword: Big men and business. Morality, debt, and the corporation: A perspective Robert J. Foster 243

Index 251

Editorial Reviews

"Each chapter in this important book, in one way or another, interrogates the slippery and shady partnerships forming between transnational corporations, international development agencies, and NGOs to further augment and implement CSR programmes...If you think critically about corporations, add this to your collection." - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"This is an insightful and original compilation of research on the novel ways in which 'market and society', and underlying dynamics of accumulation and sociality, get entangled and transformed through contemporary corporate practice. The wide range of empirical terrain traversed - in terms of the chapters' diverse ideational, social and regional settings - sets the stage for an illuminating comparative inquiry, on a timely topic of wider importance." - Jens Kjaerulff, Aalborg University

"This volume deals with what I would consider to be one of the most important issues of our time: the "ethical turn" of global capitalism, what it means, and what its possible effects might be." - Andrea Muehlebach, University of Toronto

From the Publisher