PROOF Contents

PROOF Contents List of Figure and Tables vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Contributors ix 1 Strange Bedfellows? Critiquing Corporate Social Responsibility 1 K. Ravi Raman 2 Corporate Social Responsibility in the Era of Capitalist Globalization 25 Leslie Sklair 3 Opportunities and Limits of Corporate Support for Voluntary Activity in Canada: Evidence from Voluntary Organizations 42 Paul Bowles and Fiona MacPhail 4 Indigenous and NGO Alliances Confronting Corporate and State Alliances: The Case of Jabiluka Uranium Prospect 60 Katherine Trebeck 5 Romania, Ltd – A Study of Irresponsible Conduct in Human Resources 81 Camelia Crisan 6 Extractive Industries and Stunted States: Conflict, Responsibility and Institutional Change in the Andes 97 Anthony Bebbington 7 From Corporate Accountability to Shared Responsibility: Dealing with Pollution in a Peruvian Smelter Town 116 Fabiana Li v PROOF vi Contents 8 Beyond Bureaucracies? The Struggle for Self-Determination and Social Responsibility in the Argentine Workers’ Cooperatives 130 Alice Bryer 9 Business for Peace, or Peace for Business? The Role of Corporate Peace Activism in the Rise and Fall of Sri Lanka’s 2001–2004 Peace Process 148 Rajesh Venugopal 10 Commercial Microfinance in India: Loan Angels or Sharks? 165 D. Ajit and K. Ravi Raman 11 Corporate Social Responsibility, Local Livelihood and Human Rights: The Case of Coca-Cola in India 182 K. Ravi Raman 12 Land Acquisition: Impossibility of Corporate Social Responsibility 201 Pranab Kanti Basu 13 Shifting Terrain of Ethical Trade: Corporate and Civil Society Engagement in South African Agriculture 219 Stephanie Barrientos and Andrienetta Kritzinger 14 Corporate Social Responsibility and the Problem of Human Rights: Who is Protecting Whom? 242 Ronnie D. Lipschutz Index 267 PROOF 1 Strange Bedfellows? Critiquing Corporate Social Responsibility K. Ravi Raman Introduction During the current phase of neoliberal globalization, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has generated a great deal of discussion and debate, both as a conceptual framework and as an apparently fresh facet of corporate culture, with a particular focus on business ethics, social and environmental sustainability, and human rights. While the corporate world is increasingly seen by many to be articulating its regard for social responsibility, critics see the rise of CSR as more myth than reality, and acolytes of the free market condemn even limited efforts toward more responsible corporate practices. In response to both acco- lades and attacks, socially-concerned scholars across disciplines have begun to study more closely corporate-society relations and the associ- ated CSR, including its conceptualization and ethnographic verification in various countries. Academia has also begun to address the chal- lenges faced by CSR through studies of mining and water extraction in the global south, the activities of seed multinationals in France and India and energy corporations in the West and in the Asian countries wherein the nature and scope of CSR are analysed, explored and often contested. However, to date, there has been little effort to generate a critical body of literature addressing the interdisciplinary dimensions of CSR, particularly in terms of its multicultural and multi-ethnic practices. Moreover, no systematic effort has been made to engage in collective discussions about the complex interconnectedness of the various political-economic and socio-cultural domains involved in these experiences, the very dis- tinct departures from the ideal as observed on many an occasion, or the contrasting visions and contradictions manifest in this otherwise 1 PROOF 2 Strange Bedfellows? Critiquing Corporate Social Responsibility appealing principle. The need to bring together scholars working on CSR in various domains to discuss and debate its past and present dimensions is thus clear; each such assembly of scholarly opinion represents another step towards a fresh understanding of the emerging concerns and the construction of an ethically viable CSR agenda, one that would eschew the scourge of social inequity. Yet another justification for such work is the necessity of examining CSR from innovative methodological perspectives and ideological backgrounds, not from a purely economic or political angle, but rather through ethnographies, geographies of power relations, historical ethnographic enquires and so on. The present volume is a collection of 14 chapters contributed by internationally-renowned scholars on the discourses, practices and perspectives on CSR ranging across a wide spectrum of multicultural, multi-ethnic and cross-country experiences. The chapters presented here explore both the theoretical engagements of CSR and its practical experiences through a large number of case studies across the continents. The theoretical issues addressed in the chapters include the question of the crisis of legitimization, corporate-led globalization and the formation of oligarchic state structures as well as primitive accumulation, the power of discourse as a camouflage for actual intentions and the reality of capital-labour/community contradictions. Through a large number of case studies, the authors have explored how corporate capital permeates various multicultural environments across Asia, Africa and Latin America besides the advanced countries like Canada and Australia. This collection of chapters also includes studies on anti- corporate movements, corporate–community relations, and conflicts in which the micro-physics of power creates its own macro-political effects. All the chapters are original studies, each of which provides a fresh insights into the emerging theme of corporate social responsibility and offers a critical response to the recent concerns with respect to CSR. Varieties of capitalism, violence and CSR Capitalism, which itself was born of violence as Marx would argue, is the ‘midwife’ of radically transformed social relations [or relations of production] and necessarily operates through the state,1 and more so now in the current phase of corporate-led globalization, when the state and corporate capital often join hands to privatize the public space simul- taneously generating ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001; also see Coates 2005; Goldstein 2007), corporate-state violence and CSR. Although the global economy had been showing signs of an impending PROOF K. Ravi Raman 3 recession, there was a resurgence of world capitalism as reflected in the massive increase in global foreign direct investment flows which after four consecutive years of growth, rose in 2007 by 30 per cent to reach an all-time high of 1.83 trillion US dollars, well above the previous level attained in 2000.2 The United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), France, Germany and Spain were the largest outward investors, recording FDI outflows of more than 100 billion US dollars each and contributing 64 per cent of the total outward FDI of the developed West. But the multinationals from the developing countries, particularly the East Asian newly industrialized countries and Russia were also increasingly tapping in on Western markets and thereby intensifying varieties of capitalism across continents (see Goldstein 2007; van Agtmael 2007). The increased corporate intensity, particularly in terms of ‘financialisa- tion’ and the bubble-bursting ‘stock market Keynesianism’ (see Brenner 2002, 2004), with its persistent control over the ‘internationalisation of production’ (See Fine, Lapavitsas and Milonakis) sphere is a reflection of neoliberal rationality in which all forms of exploitation, repression and corporate violence are embedded. However, what is strikingly obvious is the fact that there is also a simultaneous intensification of anti- corporate, anti-globalization movements challenging not only the corporate units at ground level but often the representative institutions of global capitalism as symbolized by GATT/WTO and the World Bank/IMF (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1989; Melucci, 1989; Escobar and Alvarez 1992, 1998; Porta and Dianni, 1999; Buttel and Gould 2004; Richter 2001). The corporate world, on its part, has been making an effort to project its commitment to social responsibility, both as a mechanism to mini- mize the resistance to their way of doing business as well as to maintain profitability. As capital turned its attention towards the rather new prac- tice of CSR, though with the old ingredients of corporate philanthropy critics viewed this as merely another strategy developed by corporate capital which is, in the final analysis, interested in accumulation alone (Jones 1996; also see De George 1996; Sklair 2001; Utting 2002; Roberts 2003; Mah 2004; Christian Aid 2004; Lipschutz and Rowe 2005; Raman 2007a). Ironically, this critical point of view is shared by the advocates of absolute market freedom as a social good, such as Milton Friedman (1988), who argued that corporate managers should be legally restrained from deviating from their proper role of maximizing shareholder value (also see Steinberg 2000). While such views constitute the ‘bad capitalism school,’ there are also those who opine that ‘weak CSR is bad development’, that ‘capitalism can make hardly any CSR’ and see ‘CSR as nothing more than good capitalism and therefore not worth thinking PROOF 4 Strange Bedfellows? Critiquing Corporate Social Responsibility about in its own right’ as elaborated by the editors of the special issue of International Affairs on CSR in the developing

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