A lot of the management-oriented literature on CSR that is taught in business schools around the world focuses on the different management strategies that companies use to promote CSR. Much of this literature assumes that CSR policies positively influence economic, social, and environmental conditions in developing countries. However, a number of recent impact studies have shown that the gains accruing to local producers, workers, and communities from the implementation of CSR policies in global production networks can at best be described as limited. Against this background a new CSR paradigm seems to be emerging. This involves a review of buyer purchasing practices, economic, social, and environmental upgrading of supplier factories,  increased use of civil society monitoring and labor agency, joint action CSR approaches implemented in industrial districts and engagement in multi-stakeholder partnerships to enhance the positive impact of CSR policies implemented in global production networks.
 
In this course, we will explore whether this new CSR paradigm really constitutes a new path to sustainable development? Sustainable development is here understood as the integration of economic, social, and environmental concerns in the policy-making in public and private actors in ways that improve the incomes, labor, and living conditions of local producers and workers while reducing environmental pollution from developing country firms. We will be do this by comparing and integrating theories of global economic organization, local economic development strategies, and the adoption of particular CSR approaches in order to explain the income, work, and environmental conditions of local producers and workers in developing country export industries. In practice, we will examine how CSR policies are structured from the top-down in global production networks (using examples from the football, garment, forestry or other industries) and the bottom-up in local economic, social, and cultural contexts in developing countries, primarily in Asia but also in Africa and Latin America.

Changes in course schedule may occur
Friday 09.50-12.25, week 36-41, 43-46

The course readings amount to around 800 pages, and you will be required to buy two-three course readers from Academic Books, Solbjerg Plads Campus, 2000 Frederiksberg which should be available by early September 2014. Mostly, the course readings consist of recent literature on CSR as it applies to developing country contexts. We have indicated some of the texts that we are likely to include in the course curriculum below.

Khan, F. and Lund-Thomsen, P. 2011, “CSR As Imperialism – Towards a Phenomenological Approach to CSR in the Developing World”, Journal of Change Management, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 73-90.
Lund-Thomsen, P. Labor Agency in the Football Manufacturing Industry of Sialkot, Pakistan. Geoforum, vol. 44, no. 1, 2013, pp. 71-81.
Oxfam, 2010. Better Jobs in Better Supply Chains, Briefings for Business no. 5, Oxfam, Oxford.
Neilson, J. and B. Pritchard, 2009. ‘Chapter One – Introduction, in Neilson, J. and B. Pritchard, Value Chain Struggles – Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India, pp. 1-26                                      
De Neve, G. Forthcoming. Entrapped Entrepreneurship: Labour Contractors in the South Indian Garment Industry. Modern Asian Studies.

De Neve, G. Forthcoming. ’Fordism, Flexible Spcialization, and CSR: How Indian garment workers critique neo-liberal labor regimes, Ethnography.
Ruwanpura, KN. & Wrigley, N. 2011. The Costs of Compliance: Views of Sri Lanka Manufacturers in Times of Global Economic Crisis, Journal of Economic Geography, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 1031-1049.