• assess how the implementation of CSR policies in global production networks affects the income, work and environmental conditions of local producers, workers, and communities in developing countries and countries in transition.
• analyze how CSR policies are embedded within different economic, social, and environmental contexts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
• critically appraise theories of global economic organization, local economic development, and CSR, as well as the research methods, that may be used to explore or explain similarities and differences in the income, work, and environmental conditions of local producers, workers, and communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

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 can use in integrating CSR within the corporation and in  its external stakeholder relations. Much of this literature assumes that CSR policies positively influence economic, social, and environmental conditions in developing countries. However, a number of 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 long-term trading relationships between buyers and suppliers, review of buyer purchasing practices, capacity building and awareness-raising at the level of local producers and workers, increased use of civil society monitoring, and engagement in multi-stakeholder partnerships to enhance the positive impact of CSR policies implemented in global production networks (GPNs).

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 of 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 doing 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, textile, agro-industrial production 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.

The course is divided into three parts. The first part is an introduction to how CSR may be defined in the context of developing countries, and the limited effects achieved under the “old CSR” paradigm in relation to improving the conditions of local producers, workers, and the environment. We will then try to understand the key features of the new paradigm of working with CSR in global production networks. In the second part of the course, we take an in-depth look at the cross-cutting theme of impact assessment that is important in relation to analyzing how CSR policies affect and are affected by local suppliers, contractors, workers, and logistics providers in developing countries. We will discuss various approaches to impact assessment, highlighting their philosophy of science underpinnings (critical realist, positivist, and social constructivist ones), the advantages/disadvantages of using quantitative vs. qualitative methods, and finally debate the ethical dilemmas related to undertaking impact studies of CSR initiatives in global production networks. Moreover, we analyze how these CSR policies are perceived from the perspectives of international buyers, suppliers, contractors, workers and logistics providers in developing countries. Finally, the course looks at whether these different actors in GPNs can jointly work together through multi-stakeholder partnerships with the aim of implementing CSR policies in global production networks?
 

To be announced on Learn