State Power: Rethinking the Role of the State in Political Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility Amid Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Crisis: BRICS vs. OECD Countries

“…Implementing voluntary initiatives for businesses to improve their employees' labor conditions and implementing socially significant projects creates a particular environmental protection sphere. Application of these practices on corporate responsibility in developing markets are found in the following readings: Benlemlih (2019) , Borges et al (2018) , Cheong et al (2017) , Denisov et al (2018) , Ge and Zhao (2017) , Gong and Ho (2018) , Han and Zheng (2016) , Krivtsov (2014) , Lee et al (2018) , Li and Liu (2018) , Malik and Kanwal (2018) , Marquis et al (2017) , Morozova et al (2018) , Mukherjee et al (2018) , Nazri et al (2018) , Popkova (2017) , Schrempf-Stirling (2018) , and Veselovsky et al (2018) , Chu et al (2018) , Frig et al (2018) , Harjoto and Laksmana (2018)) , Kansal et al (2018) , Sheikh (2019) , Utgård (2018) .…”

Bringing Political Context Back into International Business Studies of Human Rights

“…Companies are deeply embedded in their interaction with a variety of different stakeholders, including public sector and civil society organizations as well as other firms. We see that HR scholars can gain insights from the blooming literature of political corporate social responsibility (CSR) to bring back political context (Frynas & Stephens, 2015; Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011; Scherer, Rasche, Palazzo, & Spicer, 2016; Schremp-Stirling, 2016). HR research can be seen as a more empirically driven project and thus a political theory grounding can offer a solid foundation for this important stream of scholarship.…”

“…In the past decades, rapidly internationalizing firms and long supply chains have increased the visibility of human rights violations of firms as companies have had to deal with higher societal expectations for responsibility and adopting the same standards across the world. Nonetheless, HR research has traditionally been state-centric for a reason, as they have been the most serious human rights violators (e.g., Schremp-Stirling, 2016; Santoro, 2015). Replacing the state by a vague notion of institutional voids (Khanna & Palepu, 2007) and accepting a situation of governance gaps and weak state hypothesis in a globalized world, undermines the complexity of the phenomenon at hand.…”

“…As is the case for CSR research in general, we are at risk of overemphasizing one particular interpretation of globalization where the state is losing power and business becoming stronger (see Kobrin, 2009; Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011; Tainio, Meriläinen, Mäkinen, & Laihonen, 2014). The challenges of this conception of globalization are well pointed out by Schrempf-Stirling (2016) in her recent work on business and human rights issues where she argues that, despite globalization, states have significant hard law mechanisms to regulate their corporations’ foreign operations and to fill existing governance gaps. While International Governmental Organizations (IGO) have an important role to play, the key players that will interact at the local, national, and international level to either protect or violate human rights will be public sectors actors, civil society organizations, businesses, and local communities.…”

“…In line with Wright (1970: 110–111, cited in Giuliani et al, 2016) international business is about the ‘interrelationships between the operations of the business firm and international or foreign environments in which the firm operates’. To examine these environments, we suggest that a recent stream of research within political CSR, which takes state power and the need for the division of moral labor in business and human rights issues seriously (Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012; Schremp-Stirling, 2016), can offer some important building blocks.…”