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This is the submitted version of the article. The final published version is available here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00454.x/full

Citation:

Hamilton, T. 2011. Putting corporate responsibility in its place. Geography Compass 5

(10): 710-722.

Putting Corporate Responsibility in its Place

Abstract

Geographers have made significant contributions to debates about corporate social

responsibility (CSR) over the past two decades. Rather than focusing on what it means to

be a responsible corporation and the attendant ranking and ratings schemes that pervade

the CSR industry, geographers’ evaluations have extended beyond the firm, to CSR

initiatives’ broader impacts on local economic development and political processes. This

article explores four key themes in geography research on CSR: translation problems,

standards dilution, access to markets and governance structures, and institutional

embeddedness. I argue that geographers’ generally critical perspective and attention to

local specificities provide important insights for the development of an appropriate

division of labor among governments, markets, and civil society to address pressing

social and environmental concerns. I conclude with a an appeal to further broaden the

analysis of CSR beyond single initiatives or campaigns and into spaces of negotiation and

capacity-building.

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Introduction

“What’s your dissertation topic?”

“Corporate social responsibility.”

“I guess it’s going to be a short dissertation.”

The conversation above (repeated regularly while I completed my dissertation) represents

common assumptions about geographers researching corporate responsibility. In the

wake of Enron and BP, many people are flippant about the notion of corporate social

responsibility (CSR) in general; cheated pensioners and oil-soaked pelicans are hardly

ideal poster children for responsible business. But they are also surprised that CSR is a

topic for geographers. There has been a spate of work over the past decade or so by

geographers looking at the driving forces behind CSR initiatives, their outcomes on the

ground, and their broader political implications. What separates geographers’ work on

this topic from others is that geographers’ evaluations extend beyond the firm. Rather

than focusing on whether corporations are doing good or doing well by doing good

(standard preoccupations of the business management literature), geographers are

interested in how CSR initiatives affect local economic development prospects and

access to political processes (standard preoccupations of geographic research).

The goal of this article is to examine geographers’1 contributions to the broader

academic and political debates about corporate social responsbility, and I have identified

four key themes that permeate geographers’ work: translation,2 dilution, access and

embeddedness (see Table 1). While most geographic studies provide a concise discussion

of the benefits of the CSR initiative in question, the focus is largely on contradictions and

obstacles -- the translation, dilution and access problems set out below. The view, then, is

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largely a skeptical one, although not without some examples of promising models for

new economic practices and governance mechanisms. Geographers’ work on CSR is not

solely normative, however. One of the other central contributions of geographers’ work is

to highlight the embeddedeness of CSR, examining how national and local institutions

assert themselves in transnational economic and governance processes. I argue that these

criticisms and specifications serve a decidedly constructive purpose in helping to

determine (and continuously recalibrate) the division of labor among governments,

markets, and civil society that can most effectively address pressing economic, social and

environmental problems. Yet, I conclude with an appeal to further broaden the analysis of

CSR beyond single initiatives or campaigns, to evaluate their interactions -- for better or

worse -- with other economic development and political strategies, and to further explore

spaces of negotiation and capacity-building.

Defining responsibility

This CSR boom is an understandable product of both neoliberalization

(specifically, deregulation and marketization) and the increased significance of

reputational capital among corporate assets. At a time when governments are increasingly

focused on making the market a more efficient provider of social and environmental

goods rather than regulating companies outright, and companies are more concerned than

ever with managing reputational risk and enhancing their brand value, corporate

reponsibility is touted as a win-win for both. A whole industry has developed over the

past couple of decades to rank and rate corporate social and environmental performance,

producing lists of the most and least responsible corporations in the world and guiding

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consumers and investors seeking to put their money where their politics are. A study by

the CSR think tank SustainAbility found 21 ratings systems in the English-speaking

world alone (see SustainableBusiness.com 2011). Within the academic community, a

normative debate about the scope of corporations’ responsibilities also persists (see

Carroll 1999 for a history of this debate), as well as more pragmatic debates about how

stakeholder groups gain power and influence over corporate decision-making (e.g.,

Mitchell et al. 1997, Agle et al. 1999, Frooman 1999). Within geography, the corporation

is increasingly being conceived as a site of “power struggle among actors who may be

capitalists, workers, technologists, managers, regulators, analysts, strategists and so on”

(Yeung 2001: 294). Geographers have documented this contested terrain, focusing in

particular on consumers, investors, unions, and non-governmental organizations (e.g.

Emel, 2002; Clark and Hebb, 2004; Sadler, 2004; Clarke et al., 2006).

A whole range of corporate responsibility initiatives have emerged from these

contestations. For the purposes of this review, I will take a broad view of CSR activities,

including all initatives that have the stated goal of increasing the social/environmental

benefits or reducing the social/environmental harm of corporations’ activities (including

the activities of suppliers). This definition encompasses certification, codes of conduct,

and other standards that a corporation agrees to be bound to, whether externally or

internally administered (Angel et al. 2009), as well as ad hoc or one-off philanthropic

activities. Despite this broad treatment, I want to distinguish market-enabling imperatives

for CSR from regulatory ones. In their typology of governance regimes, Levy and

Prakash (2003, 134-135) describe “market-enabling regimes” as those that “reduce

transaction costs and provide collective goods important to MNCs, such as standards,

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multilateral recognition, and enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)” and

“regulatory regimes” as ones “primarily designed to impose constraints on aspects of

corporate behavior, including sourcing, production, sales, and distribution of profits”. It

may be difficult to classify most CSR initiatives as solely market-enabling or regulatory,

but understanding the main imperative behind their development and adoption is central

to understanding how they may change over time, diffuse, and ultimately succeed or fail

to effectively address specific social and environmental concerns. Geographers are very

much interested in these conflicts of purpose and effects, and this distinction between

market and regulatory imperatives runs through much of the analysis below.

Putting CSR to the test

It seems clear that CSR initiatives are creating benefits for some communities and

some ecosystems. For instance, Le Mare’s (2008) review of the literature finds a general

consensus that fair trade networks increase economic returns and social benefits for

individual producers, and internal resources and market access for cooperatives. At the

same time, she found considerable concern about whether basic needs are being met

despite these advances. Recent geographic studies of CSR initiatives are similarly

fraught. Some workers benefit from occupational health and safety improvements

(Hughes 2001, 397) and training programs (Friedberg 2003, 38). Some communities

benefit from increased access to export markets (Bassett 2010; Wilson 2010) and

development projects such as schools and childcare facilities (Dolan 2010, 38), while

some ecosystems are protected from clearcutting (Bridge and McManus 2000) and other

destructive practices. Yet, many researchers question whether these benefits outweigh the

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opportunity costs of channeling so much consumer, investor, union, and NGO resources

into market-based political strategies (e.g. Emel 2002).

It would be unfair to expect corporations to transform their production systems

and community involvement patterns overnight, hence we should expect to find code

violations and inconsistencies. Indeed, many corporations portray their CSR initiatives

as an ongoing journey. From Starbucks: “While we are proud of our accomplishments,

we recognize our challenges. Our effort to revolutionize the coffee industry … will not

happen overnight and will remain an ongoing journey” (Starbucks Corporation 2004, 3).

What most of these studies find, however, is that the market-enabling imperatives of CSR

initiatives tend to take over or outweigh the regulatory ones, leading to a systemic failure

to address certain concerns. In other words, it is not simply a matter of time, but a case of

the social and environmental standards pursued by advocates being regularly mis-

translated and diluted by market forces.

TRANSLATION

Geographers have documented several problems in translating social and

environmental concerns into effective CSR initiatives. First, the extension of governance

networks across borders and the privileging of consumer “votes” to drive corporate

change has created plenty of opportunity for the intentional misrepresentation of so-

called ethical products, and consumers are often tempted by ethical “lore” (e.g. Benson

and Fischer 2007; Le Billon 2006; Bryant and Goodman 2004; Guthman 2002). Bryant

and Goodman (2004, 350) describe the “Edenic myth-making” at work on products such

as Amazon Flakes cereal, for instance. While the box describes an Eden in crisis and a

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caring consumer come to the rescue, they note the “rather opaque if not downright

problematic link between consumption of this cereal and ‘saving the Amazon’” (2004,

351). The health claims on the box are slightly more scrutable (e.g. ‘no chemicals or

preservatives’), no doubt playing on complex consumer desires for quality, healthy

products that protect their families at the same time as the Amazon. Since the former are

satisfied directly, the latter, given consumers’ stated time constraints, may not ever be

scrutinized.

In other cases, consumers may romanticize product origins and corporate

practices out of simple naivety. Benson and Fischer (2007, 809) encountered consumers

of Guatemalan broccoli, for instance, who claimed to “prefer imported produce because,

as one man put it, ‘big farms in California use too many pesticides and chemicals’,”

apparently ignorant of “the fact that Guatemalan producers also use chemicals and that

pesticide applications are one of the main challenges that they face”. Market signals are

also sometimes misdirected due to commodity-chain ignorance. Hilson (2008, 386)

explains that fair trade gold campaigners targeting Western jewelers in efforts to improve

the lot of artisanal miners in sub-Saharan Africa would be more effective in targeting

“host governments, and not Western retailers, as the ‘end consumer’.” He explains that

governments in the region are the main buyers of artisanal gold as it is an important

source of foreign exchange (ibid., 390). In this case, then, efforts to improve the terms of

trade and livelihoods of artisanal miners require redirection.

There are conditions under which ethical or political consumption has a more

direct link to social and environmental performance “on the ground”. Some fair trade

markets (at least in their early or most progressive iterations) foster a “solidarity-seeking

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commodity culture” (Bryant and Goodman 2004, 355) wherein “[v]alue … is created

through the de-fetishizing of commodity cultures precisely to allow consumers, it is

hoped, to make moral and economic connections to the producers of the food they ingest”

(ibid., 359). Several authors (e.g. Bryant and Goodman 2004; Friedberg 2007; Goodman

2010; Guthman 2007; Jackson 2002) are quick to problematize this connection, however.

One concern is that the early “‘thick description of the producers’ lives and livelihoods”

(Goodman 2010, 111) is increasingly being replaced by celebrity endorsements, eco- and

ethical logos and other images that mask conditions at sites of production and extraction

even as they vouch for them. Moreover, despite early calls to arms (e.g. Hartwick 2000),

there is no guarantee that “lifting the veil” over the conditions of production will

necessarily move consumers to action. As described above, most consumers are engaged

in a constant balancing act between their desires for quality, convenience and

responsibility (Benson and Fischer 2007), generating intermittent and often ambiguous

signals about their true social and environmental concerns.

Similar translation concerns frustrate efforts to drive corporate responsibility

through investor portfolios. While some investors -- particularly institutional investors

who have long-term fiduciary responsibilities to their beneficiaries -- have engaged

corporations on social and environmental performance, they generally frame this

“engagement with corporations as primarily a risk-reduction strategy” (Clark and Hebb

2005, 2026). This same risk-reduction imperative is argued to be behind the UK

government’s recent CSR cheerleading, specifically, their new disclosure rules on social

and environmental issues. Clark and Knight (2009) explain that

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the disclosure requirements … are entirely consistent with Anglo-

American investor expectations [and]… the motivating logic of such

disclosure has more to do with the market pricing of corporate value than

expansion of the scope of corporate social responsibility (ibid., 262) .

As with the consumers who make “ethical” purchasing decisions based primarily on

quality or health considerations, the potential impact of the risk reduction model of

socially responsible investing (SRI) is, at best, limited to those practices and places where

financial and social/environmental concerns are directly aligned. There has been a

continual broadening of the scope of social and environmental issues included in such

risk assessments, and yet some issues, such as wages and poverty, are notoriously

difficult to translate into business risks because they are not propelled by the impending

regulations and relative scientific consensus that drive other issues such as climate

change.3

In addition to distorting and limiting the market signals that drive some CSR

initiatives, translation problems also trouble the implementation process. Friedberg

(2003, 38-39) relates the story of the unintended negative consequences of childcare

provisions in retailer-driven horticultural standards deployed in Zambia, explaining that

these facilities get little use, because most rural women workers do not

like to leave their children with strangers. According to one outgrower,

also a woman, ‘It’s not part of their culture; they just won’t do it’. But the

workers are not allowed to bring their babies to the fields with them, due

to sanitary standards.

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It is no surprise, then, that Le Mare (2008) and Lyon et al. (2010) also find gender equity

to be one issue unevenly addressed by fair trade standards, as it is a good example of an

issue that requires extensive knowledge of workers’ daily lives rather than the simple

application of abstract norms.

DILUTION

Once implemented, CSR initiatives are subject to several dilution processes. The

costs of adhering to CSR standards are often borne by producers with already tight

margins, and the ethical profit squeeze can result in practices strikingly at odds with the

spirit, if not the letter, of the standards. For instance, Guthman (2004, 311) finds that the

operations of even “the most social movement-oriented organic growers” are “strikingly

intensified, pulling two to five crops, including a cover crop, from a given piece of land

in any given year.” And, on fair trade- certified coffee farms in Nicaragua, Wilson (2010)

finds farmers caught in a cycle of debt, unable to maintain productivity or quality, and

imposing extreme austerity measures on their own households to get by.

Dilution also occurs by industry co-option of social and environmental narratives

(Bridge and McManus 2000). This co-option often results from more rigorous standards

being beat out in the standards marketplace by less onerous industry-led alternatives.

Correia (2010) describes the increasing dominance of the industry-led Sustainable

Forestry Initiative (SFI) over Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification in Maine.

He explains that this shift from the FSC to SFI standard is partly due to institutional

investors buying an increasing share of Maine’s forest lands. From their perspective, the

FSC “creates a huge risk factor. Their rigorous standards are unpredictable, change

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frequently and are hard to model” (ibid., 71). For instance, Klooster (2010, 121) explains

that concerns over the certification of plantations prompted the FSC to add new

principles, including wildlife corridor requirements and restrictions on new native forest

conversions. While he concludes that these updates challenge traditional “expectations

that mainstreaming … will lead to significant erosion of … standards” (ibid., 125), one of

Correia’s (2010, 72) investors contends that the “SFI ‘gets the same treatment in the

marketplace’,” clearly swaying investors’ cost-benefit analysis toward the less stringent

standard.

In a similar process, dilution can result from the codification and subsequent

narrowing of CSR concerns. Schroeder (2010, 59) explains that Afgem, the world’s

largest tanzanite producer, initially deployed an offensive branding strategy based on

rarity, quality and social responsibility appeals (including development projects and

living wages for miners). With the advent of new US Patriot Act regulations addressing

concerns linking tanzanite and money-laundering for al-Qaeda, however, Afgem shifted

away from a broader ethical platform to a defensive, legalistic focus on traceability and

security (ibid.). Once the early “fuzzy” CSR demands from the marketplace were

replaced by a narrower legal framework, the company shifted to compliance mode, and,

as in the forestry case above, likely received as many benefits from the marketplace as

they did from their previous efforts. This example also shows that the state’s role in CSR

initiatives is a complicated one, and it should not be seen unproblematically as the means

to putting muscle behind previously voluntary initiatives.

In some cases standards are not only diluted, but totally dissolved, as relatively

footloose companies decide to reorganize their supply chains rather than comply with

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new expectations. For instance, Werner and Cravey (2002) describe a transnational

solidarity campaign in support of apparel factory workers in Guatemala that resulted in a

union contract followed by the international retailer’s decision to shutter their factory

rather than honor it. Overall, these translation and dilution problems suggest that market

signals are not, in and of themselves, adequate governance mechanisms for corporate

social and environmental impacts. Moreover, there is concern that ethical or political

consumption may reduce the likelihood that consumers will participate in “more

demanding forms of resistance to social injustice and environmental degradation” (Bryant

and Goodman 2004, 360).

ACCESS

One cause of the translation problems and dilution effects that geographers have

highlighted is the uneven access that different firms and organizations have to ethical

markets and governance structures. The rationalization of supply chains is a common

result of the dominance of market imperatives, and in study after study, researchers find

artisanal and small-scale miners (Schroeder 2010), community foresters (Klooster 2006

and 2010), small-scale farmers (Guthman 1998; Friedberg 2003; Mutursbaugh 2005;

Wilson 2010) and small and medium-sized manufacturing firms (Neumayer and Perkins

2010) under-resourced for the CSR marketplace. In many cases, they simply cannot

sustain the costs of certification without external support. In others, the mainstreaming or

cooption of ethical credentials cuts into their unique competitive advantage. Whatever the

cause, the result of this rationalization is that the benefits of these ethical markets may be

repatriated outside of the communities they originally intended to benefit.

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Despite this general rationalization trend, some CSR projects aim to actively

redistribute power, risk, and rents. For instance, Bassett (2010), describes a 5-year

agreement between Victoria’s Secret and a Burkina Faso cotton producers union that,

rather than simply altering prices paid and imposing new production standards, reworks

the supply chain by having Victoria’s Secret’s largest supplier buy the cotton directly

from growers, bypassing the traditional cotton traders and increasing growers’ value

share. The niche women’s empowerment market that Victoria’s Secret is intending to

capitalize on (40% of the benefitting producers are women) makes the mainstreaming of

this model unlikely, but there are potential spin-off benefits for other growers through the

additional resources generated for the broader producers union.

Raynolds and Ngcwangub (2010) describe the success of black farmer-owned

Roobios tea cooperatives in South Africa. They explain that through the

resources accessed through Fair Trade networks … [they developed] post-

harvest processing facilities and, even more importantly, a tea packaging

plant …, becoming involved in more profitable processing, blending,

packaging, and exporting activities previously dominated by large white-

owned enterprises (Raynolds and Ngcwangub 2010, 82).

While these examples shows that fair trade initiatives can lead to a restructuring of

commodity chain rewards, Raynolds and Ngcwangub caution that white-owned

plantations are increasing their share of the market, putting the sustainability of these

cooperative enterprises in question (see Dolan 2010 for another example of the

corporatization of the fair trade tea market). On the other hand, mission-driven

distributors such as Equal Exchange are actively challenging the certification of

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plantations to ensure that small farmers are indeed empowered through the fair trade

schemes (ibid., 81).

Equal Exchange’s role in bringing the voices of black-owned cooperatives into

certification deliberations mirrors other work on the importance of maintaining access to

standards governance mechanisms for the communities and constituencies they are

intended to benefit as they are continuously revised and applied around the world. While

trumped-up projects may successfully anchor public relations and advertising campaigns

in end markets, companies are in fact subject to more than market pressure. For instance,

Hale and Wills (2007) describe the role of Women Working Worldwide (WWW) in the

Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). They explain that WWW aims “to bridge the gaps

between these high-level initiatives and … workers themselves” (ibid., 463), and describe

their success in mediating “a complaint from the Kenya Women Workers’ Organization

about conditions on flower farms supplying UK supermarkets” that resulted in “a

stakeholder initiative in Kenya” and “visible improvements on some of the farms” (ibid.,

466).

Watts (2005) describes a more informal process of continuous engagement in

Nigeria where ongoing community resistance and increasing militancy are important

drivers of Shell’s CSR evolution. He explains that the most recent iterations of Shell and

other oil companies’ sustainable local development programs attempt to overcome past

problems by eliminating community bribes and by outsourcing development projects to

NGOs with more local ties and knowledge (ibid., 400; see also Ite 2004). Despite the

hard-fought successes of this community, Watts argues in favor of the codification of

responsibilities into international law (such as the UN Draft Norms) (ibid., 401), a step

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that companies have actively resisted (see Sadler and Lloyd 2009). Such advocacy

reflects a common concern among geographers about the uneven development of

responsibilities left to market mechanisms and imperatives. There seems to be consensus

that, barring a new international legal regime, ongoing access to decision-making

processes by NGOs and local communities (in addition to market actors) is essential for

generating continuous improvement and preventing widespread greenwashing and

whitewashing (see also Hadfield-Hill 2007 re: revisions to the Equator Principles). We

might differentiate between two types of governance networks, then, interest networks

and access networks. I define interest networks as those consisting of stakeholders with a

common interest in a corporation’s social or environmental performance where that

interest is represented by consumers, investors or other market actors. The term “interest

network” reflects the discourse of common interests uniting consumers and shareholders

with workers, local communities and ecosystems. Geographers find the on-the-ground

benefits of these networks limited. The fact that market imperatives – reputational gains,

risk minimization or corporate efficiency – are the driving rationale for change and

marginalized stakeholders rarely play an active role in the negotiation of new

responsibilities and implementation plans, leads to many of the failures discussed above.

By contrast, the goal of access networks, such as the one spearheaded by Women

Working Worldwide (WWW), is to bring marginalized stakeholders’ voices to the

decision-making table -- whether their interests directly overlap with investors,

consumers and others or not -- to ensure CSR initiatives are rigorous and relevant. In

other words, access networks, although admittedly much rarer and more difficult to

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sustain than interest networks, attempt to provide marginalized stakeholders with a direct

claim on the corporation.

EMBEDDEDNESS

The viability of different types of governance structures and the relative

significance of market versus regulatory imperatives is partly a product of national

institutional differences. Since the nature of the relationship among actors in the

regulatory sphere varies based on national and local specificities (see Barnes and Hayter

2005), several geographers have taken up the concept of the national embeddedness of

CSR activities. Hughes et al. (2007) contrast the UK-based Ethical Trading Initiative

(ETI) with the US Fair Labor Association (FLA). They describe the ETI’s “emphasis on

collaborative learning and the development of ‘best practice’” and “the lack of any strict

demands for transparency and enforcement of the code on the part of its retail members”

(ibid., 499). By contrast, they describe the American model as legalistic, with FLA

guidelines that are more “directive” than the ETI code and external monitoring and

reporting designed to drive consumer action (ibid., 504).

Christopherson and Lillie (2005) make similar distinctions between IKEA’s

developmental and long-term relationships with suppliers and Wal-Mart’s legal liability

approach wherein contraventions are met by simply severing ties with a supplier. At the

root of these differences, they argue, are two contrasting labor relations models. The

IKEA model involves ongoing relationships with unions who bring problems to their

attention quietly and directly, reflecting “the relatively labor-friendly Nordic model”

(ibid., 1928). National institutional differences affect how much access different

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stakeholders have to the governance system and, by implication, the effectiveness of CSR

initiatives in serving local economic development and other needs (see also Cumbers 2004

re: national influences on transnational union organizing).

National governance models are far from deterministic, however, and CSR

activities are embedded in distinct corporate as well as national cultures. Even among ETI

members, Hughes (2005) finds significant diversity in implementation of the guidelines

based on corporate values, financial position, and retail strategy. While a lack of financial

resources and a low-cost retail strategy are understandably associated with a lower

commitment to ethical trade, Hughes shows that different value orientations by senior

management affect the type of social auditing they commit to. She argues,

The more ethically driven retailers … are shown to champion coordinated

and developmental approaches to social auditing … whereas the majority

of retail firms with a more minimalist attitude to ethical trade tend to adopt

an arm's-length approach to the social auditing of their suppliers (ibid.,

1154).

We might understand the arm’s-length approach as one that aims to secure consumer and

investor confidence without significantly transforming the company’s operations or

mission, whereas the coordinated and developmental approaches bring suppliers, unions,

NGOs and others into the firm’s decision-making processes.

National priorities and institutional differences can assert themselves in other

jurisdictions as well. The so-called “trading up” and “California effect” (see Vogel 1997)

are processes whereby government social and environmental mandates influence corporate

performance beyond their own borders. Case studies of specific firms (Angel and Rock

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2005) and quantitative analysis of large datasets (Neumayer and Perkins 2004; Perkins

and Neumayer 2010) provide evidence of this trading up effect, leading to the diffusion of

toxic materials and environmental management standards, for instance, into some places

where one might expect a “pollution haven” instead. The state is clearly not dead, then,

when it comes to driving corporate responsibility initiatives, although market imperatives

such as trade access and supply-chain efficiency facilitate some states’ extended reach.

Conclusions

Geographers’ evaluations of CSR initiatives are focused on how they affect local

economic development trajectories and ecosystems, and on the distribution of risks,

responsibility, and power within the global economy rather than how successfully

corporations manage stakeholder expectations and maintain or increase reputational

capital (as may be the perspective of a fund manager or CEO). Running through this

literature is a narrative that shows standards being diluted, large corporations winning out

over smaller producers, and business continuing much as usual. At the same time, most

of the studies find some greening around the edges or islands of development, essentially

what we might expect to find based on the problematic politics, mixed signals, and varied

national institutions described above.

Overall, geographers’ work suggests that market pressures and imperatives are

not satisfactory or appropriate final arbiters of corporate responsibility, yet I would argue

that we need to expand the boundaries of our own analysis beyond individual initiatives

(see Clarke 2008; Hamilton 2009). While there is considerable speculation about the

impact of CSR initiatives on individual participation in protest movements and other

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forms of politics, there has not been much research that actually tracks these impacts.

Barnett et al. (2005, 32) explain that ethical consumption devices (such as certification

schemes) aim to not only provide the means to match consumption practices to ones

existing ethics, but also to transform those “ethical dispositions” themselves. Clarke

(2008, 1878) argues that this framing of ethical consumption as part of a broader political

project necessarily changes the criteria by which we judge its success or failure away

from mainstreaming (i.e. total consumer dollars spent or factories and farms certified)

toward its broader political impacts. While such an analysis may very well confirm

geographers’ fears about the opportunity costs of CSR politics, it may also reveal

important synergies between market and traditional state-centered politics. For instance,

Benson and Fischer (2007, 812) encounter a Mayan broccoli farmer who “hopes that

[export] revenues can be used to enhance the local educational and economic

infrastructure and in political organizing at the regional and national levels. [He] tells us

that ‘some producers have begun to fund Maya revitalization efforts, bilingual education,

and political activities’.”

Finally, while geographers have succeeded in putting corporate responsibility in

its place in several ways – by examining the interplay of different scales of activity and

the appropriate balance between market mechanisms and other means of achieving local

economic development, environmental protection, and other goals -- there are important

spaces of negotiation and capacity-building that deserve more attention. Hughes (2006)

and Sadler and Lloyd (2009) introduce us to the CSR consulting industry that is shaping

CSR discourse and practice in the UK, but it is important to delve deeper into these

spaces where new responsibilities are negotiated and capacities developed. Some

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important questions for geographers include the access that different constituencies have

to these spaces and the difference that place makes to standards negotiations. As

corporations engage in a continuous renegotiation of their responsibilities and seek to

define and apply codes they have already agreed to, it likely matters whether they make

decisions about the meaning of endangered forests or living wages virtually or in the

forests and communities of concern, for instance. Barton (2005) describes the intriguing

case of a mining executive’s “apparent personal transformation” on a trip to Orissa, India

with an Oxfam Community Aid Abroad Corporate Leadership Program that introduced

business executives to large- and small-scale development projects through local NGO

and communities’ eyes. NGO staff described him as “‘Saul on the road to Damascus,’” “a

changed man” previously “reviled by community leaders” who gained a “newfound

empathy for the communities” he was negotiating with in Peru. How significantly such

empathy can transform business decisions is an important question, and we need to

maintain a healthy debate about just how alternative various CSR initiatives are (see, for

instance, McCarthy 2006). At the same time, economic geography’s “cultural turn” and

the problematization of unified narratives of the corporation (e.g. O’Neill and Gibson-

Graham 1999) suggest we track non-market imperatives and competing desires even in

the halls (and forests and fields) of corporate decision-making.

Notes

1 I include the work of Geographers and other researchers publishing in Geography

journals.

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2 I am indebted to Phelps and Wood (2006) for their discussion of translation and the

interplay among transnational and local interests.

3 For instance, a study by The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA 2010)

finds that metrics for reporting social issues are much less prevalent than those for

governance and environmental issues such as climate change.

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Table 1: Key themes in geography research on corporate responsibility

Key themes Central arguments

Translation

- ethical “lore,” ignorance of conditions on the ground, and

conflicting desires often lead to misdirected consumer signals

- the difficulty of translating some social and environmental issues

into business risks limits investor support for CSR initiatives

- transnational standards may be innapropriate for local social and

environmental conditions, leading to unintended negative

consequences

Dilution - the costs of implementation can lead to an ethical profit squeeze

on producers and practices at odds with the spirit, if not the letter,

of new social and environmental standards

- competition among standards can result in diluted, industry-led

standards overtaking more rigorous, multi-stakeholder initiatives

- the codification of social and environmental concerns can result

in a narrowing of corporate CSR initiatives

- corporations with flexible supply chains can evade new standards

by shifting production to less regulated or less visible spaces

Access - small-scale producers are often under-resourced to sustain new

CSR standards and access ethical markets

- it is critical that the communities and constituencies that

standards are intended to benefit have access to the governance

mechansism as the standards are continously revised and applied

around the world

Embeddedness - national and local institutions affect the nature of CSR initiatives

developed in different countries, including the relative emphasis

on market versus regulatory imperatives, and the roles of different

stakeholder groups

- institutional differences also affect the local viability of diverse

transnational CSR standards