So a very warm welcome and good evening to everyone.
And of course, a very warm welcome in particular to our guest
and speaker, Professor Elke Schussler
from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz.
And due to a number of unforeseen developments,
which I will not mention by name,
Elke cannot join us today in person, but of course,
she's here in person, but she will obviously give her a lecture
in this Zoom presentation.
Elke Schussler is Professor of Business Administration
and Head of the Institute of Organization Science
at Johannes Kepler University of Linz.
Before that, she was an Assistant Professor
of Organization Theory at Freie Universität Berlin,
where she also completed her PhD.
She originally, I mean,
this is always the interesting question,
where do you come from academically?
And she told us in a meeting we had before,
she has a background in psychology,
but then moved into industrial relations
and sort of more management and now organization theory.
She's been doing research work
in many different places around the world.
Her main research focuses on social challenges,
such as globalization, climate change,
decent work and digitalization.
And she's been particularly involved in a project sort
of on garment supply chain governance funded
by the Volkswagen Foundation.
This is also how we met, I mean, through sort of
in a different context, but we were both invited to an event.
I believe it was virtually in Switzerland,
but of course, it was a Zoom event,
and this is how I got to know Elke, and I'm very pleased
that she is with us tonight.
Elke Schuster is also a member of the advisory board
of the International Doctorate Program, which is sort
of affiliated with the lecture series.
So we are also very happy that she is with us today, tonight.
And yeah, I think without further ado,
and I believe I've sort of mentioned all organizational
matters, Elke, I can give the floor now to you.
I was searching for my unmute button.
OK, well, thank you for the introduction, Markus,
and for the invite.
I'm really glad to be here.
We already had an interesting debate with the doctoral
students beforehand, and I love the interdisciplinary
perspectives you bring together.
And I hope I understood my task for today correctly,
to give a bit of a basic introduction
into the concept of corporate responsibility
and the sort of business perspective behind it.
So the first part of my talk today
will be focused around that, and I will
be problematizing the concept.
We talked earlier about sort of our own personal and normative
angles on these questions.
So I guess here, my personal perspective, of course,
comes through, which is a critical one.
I will talk a little bit about the project
that Markus mentioned about corporate responsibility
in the garment industry and what I've taken away from that.
And I guess that's part of the reason
of why I'm critical towards the concept.
And then talk a little bit about how
the topic of human rights emerged for me
in the context of this project and where
I see the potentialities of it without being a human rights
scholar.
So I have more to learn from you than you from me,
I guess, in that regard.
So I look really forward to the discussion on that.
In the final part, I will talk about some new ideas
that we're currently working on, so moving a bit from basic
to cutting-edge ongoing research as I move along.
OK, so very basic.
And I guess you know that the relationship
between corporations and society or social and environmental
responsibility is a difficult one.
And actually, throughout history,
there have been different approaches.
And what has been a very prominent approach, of course,
is the one that Milton Friedman expressed
in a much cited newspaper piece, an article, which
gave rise to the neoliberal market economy,
as we know it, I suppose.
And there he very clearly and also provocatively,
of course, claimed there's only one social responsibility
of business, which is to make profits, basically.
So he's very clearly advocated for separation between the two.
When we look back further in history, actually,
with the rise of corporations, they
were much more embedded in society
and had a much clearer understanding
that they were, of course, also responsible for local labor
markets and so on.
So Friedman's statement really introduced
the sort of neoliberal understanding,
which also came along with a shift from sort of orientation
towards stakeholders of the corporation towards a sole
focus on shareholders.
In business and management studies, there are,
of course, this is very contested,
and we see different views and perspectives.
So I briefly want to talk through them.
The first one about the relationship
is the one I just mentioned, the Friedman one, which basically
says corporations are their market actors.
They have to serve shareholder interests.
And they're not responsible for any common goods.
But of course, we already see that this argument is not
quite correct because corporations do influence
society through the lobbying and through shaping
the rules of the game in their favor.
So this idea of a complete detachment
is in itself rather flawed or incomplete.
There's a second more positive view,
and I guess that view has driven much
of the CSR, which is short for Corporate Social Responsibility
Research, in the past decades, which
is the idea that, well, especially globalized markets
where we see global supply chains, the market actors fail
or the markets themselves fail to address
social and ecological problems because they're not
part of the regulatory free trade machine, as it were.
But multinational corporations actually
can step in as so-called corporate citizens
to democratize markets.
And the authors advocating for that perspective particularly
had in mind less developed countries where there's often
weak regulation for certain social and environmental
standards.
So the optimistic view is that these Western multinationals
can come in with the baggage they bring in terms
of better standards and so on and actually
help to enforce them.
So very optimistic view.
And increasingly, as sort of reality
shows that this is not quite working,
as maybe it could in theory is that, well, yes,
these globalized markets fail to address these problems.
They actually create many of the problems we see.
And the concept of corporate responsibility
doesn't do much to help that issue
because it really serves only some stakeholders
and in fact legitimizes this idea of free and unregulated
markets.
So I will talk a bit more about especially these latter two
perspectives and the debates here.
So this is just a visualization of that idea.
So Professor Anetti will now illustrate
how to put social responsibility ahead of profits in order
to make even more profit.
So this is the idea that has become very dominant, also
among practitioners.
We talked about that earlier in the debate.
So there were some scholars that really promoted this idea
that there can be a win-win, right?
So you can actually become a better and economically more
successful company by investing in corporate responsibility.
And this win-win idea, of course, was adopted,
was very welcomed by practitioners because it
solved some of their problems they otherwise
would have had in their corporations.
So what is actually the idea of corporate responsibility
or corporate social responsibility?
I often prefer to leave out the social
because in my understanding, it also includes environmental.
But CSR as an abbreviation is so well known
that I will stick with that.
So what is it?
Well, it's a concept whereby companies
integrate social and environmental concerns
in their business operations and in their interaction
with stakeholders on a voluntary basis.
So that's how the European Commission defines it.
And that definition is very important to understand.
So CSR is a voluntary concept.
It relies on this idea that behaving responsibly
is something that corporations do voluntarily.
Very optimistic viewpoint again.
And well, how could you sell this to businesses?
Of course, by arguing there's a win-win in it.
Why should they do it?
Well, if someone tells me it pays off,
of course, they're more willing to do it voluntarily
than if it doesn't pay off.
A bit of the history, if you're interested in it,
I can really recommend this article by Malens
in Socio-Economic Review.
He really sort of unrolls the history of the concept
and locates it very much in the US economy
and the strong movement we've had in the US
to dismantle the labor movement and move labor relations
themselves also into the realm of voluntary behavior.
The concept of HRM, human resource management,
is actually also the fruit of these sort
of anti-union, anti-collective action efforts
in the US.
And these concepts sort of say, well, we don't need unions.
We don't need regulation, right?
Because we as companies, we take care of our human resources.
We take care of social responsibility.
And society can trust us that we take it
into our managerial hands.
And of course, European businesses and also
European regulators, then as you see in the European Commission
definition, very happily adopted this concept
upon intense lobbying, of course,
from the business community and also fully
embraced this idea of voluntary CSR,
as it's called in the debate.
But of course, there is this big question of, well,
so what is it?
These are actually an adequate tool
to tame the market economy if you
wanted to counterbalance some of the negative externalities.
Or is it actually a tool that only serves to legitimate
and maintain the free market unregulated businesses that
go on about their business as usual?
The very common view and one that has also
been quite common or surfaced a lot in our research,
as I will talk about later, is this win-win logic,
also called the business case of CSR.
So the idea that there is a business case that it pays off.
And a lot of research has gone into it.
And there are definitely a lot of studies that show,
yes, there seems to be some kind of financial benefit.
Or there seem to be other benefits like reputation
or higher employee satisfaction and so on.
But usually with these studies, it's unclear which,
I mean, CSR is such a broad term.
It encompasses so many different things.
It's unclear which of these activities actually pay off.
And now it's not so recent anymore, but I mean,
10 years old, the idea of shared value
was a further iteration of this business case.
And Michael Porter was very well known
in the business and the practitioner community,
really pushed this idea that, yes, the two goals,
economic and social value creation,
they can be connected.
And it was published in Harvard Business Review.
So it was really widely adopted, this understanding
by the business community.
And he gives examples like the Grameen Bank
social enterprises, enterprises that serve a social purpose,
but that also are economically successful.
Of course, there's a lot of critique,
as I mentioned, of this idea.
First of all, in terms of the studies,
it's completely unclear what is actually the causality.
So this is a common problem.
If really there is a link between corporations
investing in CSR and their financial performance,
what is the chicken and what is the egg?
Maybe successful companies have more leeway
to invest in CSR projects, but maybe they're not successful
because of these CSR projects.
Then there's this critique that I already
mentioned about the unintended consequences
of this win-win idea.
And it might be that corporations only
invest in small problems.
So it's maybe much easier to see the direct payoff
if you invest in an employee pension fund or something
like that, which makes your employees more happier
and gives you an advantage in recruiting and so on.
It's much more difficult to really show payoff
if you raise wages for the or if you pay higher prices
that at the end benefit the workers down the end of your
supply chains.
So this idea of greenwashing, of course,
or there's much attempt to do greenwashing to post.
We're doing a lot of CSR, lots of problems,
but these problems are really small scale
and not getting to the root of the bigger inequalities
underlying global supply chains.
It legitimizes the absence of political regulation.
And that's actually, as I mentioned,
why the concept was promoted in the first place.
So yes, we're businesses are in control.
We do it voluntarily.
We don't need regulation.
And in a way, it extends the market logic
by actually moving areas that would
have been part of public regulation
into the realm of private corporations.
It extends the market logic even further.
And some would even say the shared value concept is simply
naive because, yes, there might be a case like the Grameen
Bank and many other cases.
But if we look at these complex global supply chains,
it's just naive to say there will be sort of shared value
all along.
So a very short excursion because we talked early also
about the role of language and vocabulary.
How did we get there?
And I want to just point out the doctoral dissertation,
actually, of a dear colleague of mine, Nora Lohmeier, who
has analyzed the discourse about CSR in Germany.
So for those of you that speak German, it's a German book.
It's definitely a very good read.
And she shows through this discourse analysis
how the discourse really has shifted.
And she identified three main motives
of four CSR in the debate, the moral one,
an instrumental one, and a relational one.
And of course, the moral one is about doing good,
doing the right thing.
It's a moral obligation to do the right thing.
And the instrumental one is the sort of win-win logic.
We do CSR to make profits because it pays off.
And she can show very clearly here's
one of the charts from her study how the discourse has shifted
from a focus on moral to instrumental motives.
And interestingly, she has then analyzed
the different actor groups.
And interestingly, it has shifted
across all different actor groups.
So it's kind of obvious that it would have shifted
within the business community because they basically
adopted the language from the United States.
But it also shifted among state actors.
And it shifted among other stakeholders,
particularly the trade unions, who also adopted this language
of instrumentality because that appeared as the compromise,
right?
Like the win-win logic.
It's always great to have some concepts where suddenly
everyone can sign up to.
So it emerges a compromise.
But of course, this discourse shift
had very clear regulatory implications.
And so this message pushed by the business community
with a sort of claim frees us up from regulation.
So we, the good corporate citizens, can be responsible.
Basically meant that politicians also in Europe
embraced this voluntary CSR approach
and stayed away from overly regulating businesses.
What was the result of that?
And I think some of you, the doctoral students here,
want to study further.
Some of these initiatives is what
WADOP calls a complex voluntary CSR infrastructure.
So within this voluntary CSR, yes, corporations
have been very busy.
They have invested in a lot of initiatives.
And actually, a whole industry has arisen
around these initiatives.
So they've developed codes of conduct as the first step.
They're auditing regimes.
Then of course, there are auditors who do these audits.
There's a whole reporting industry going on.
There's a whole web also of reports floating around.
So this infrastructure and WADOP sense
is not just actors, but also sort of the products
they produce.
And multi-stakeholder initiatives,
which is what some of you want to study,
WADOP counts very clearly as part of this voluntary CSR
initiative.
So of course, they try to move away
from sort of a unilateral corporate approach
into connecting the stakeholders into coming
to some kind of collective agreement.
But it's still all very much on the basis of voluntary action.
So that was the first part about the CSR.
I will end here.
So this is sort of where we have gotten to.
This was also the basis from which we started our research
project on the garment industry, which I will now
briefly introduce.
So I guess some of you might remember
the disastrous event.
Actually, I heard from my colleagues
who show this slide to the students
that this year is the first year that many of their students
don't know anymore what this is.
Up until last year, everyone knew what it is.
It happened in 2013.
So it's already fading out of the memory.
Or some students are simply too young to have experienced it.
But it still feels very much present.
So in 2013, a garment factory or a factory building,
a business building in Dhaka and Bangladesh
just fully collapsed, as you can see in the picture.
And the building housed several businesses.
But most importantly, it housed some garment factories.
And the building was audited shortly before.
Actually, several companies also were very aware
that something would happen in Bangladesh.
Industrial accidents have happened before anyway
in this industry.
But they were very well aware that something
would happen because the building structure in Bangladesh
was just so bad.
So many people were aware of it and would say,
this was a disaster waiting to happen.
And unfortunately, it has happened,
leaving over 1,000 people dead, over 2,000 people severely
injured.
And it followed, of course, a big outcry in the industry,
but also beyond.
There was a big media debate, which sort of brought
into focal attention these problematic working conditions
in global garment supply chains, which, of course,
we have known about since the 1990s,
since the first campaigns against the Nike,
and Adidas, and child labor, and so on.
But these issues, it always depends
on the campaigns and contestations.
It surfaces in the attention, and then it disappears again.
So this really brought it into attention.
And here's a quote from one of our interviews
with the CSR managers that sums it up pretty well.
The mood in the industry that says, well,
whatever Rana has told us is that
what we were doing, it doesn't work.
And with that, they refer pretty much
to what I've just described as voluntary CSR.
Because most leading fashion brands will, by 2013,
have invested quite a bit in CSR initiatives.
They all will have had developed codes.
They all will have had some auditing.
They will have been the progressive one part
of multi-stakeholder initiatives.
Yet none of this really helped in preventing this from happening.
So that's what got me and some colleagues interested,
because we see this industry as a critical case
for many of these complex problems that we study.
And we got funding for a research project
that really looked at the aftermath of Rana Plaza.
So what was happening in this industry on a company level,
but also on a regulatory level in response to this disaster,
with the attempt to make garment supply chains more sustainable
or responsible, just to stick with that term.
And we had a comparative research design
with teams in the UK, in Sweden, in Australia,
and also in Bangladesh and in Germany,
to really study also the impact it would have
had in different countries.
And we interviewed a lot of managers
from leading garment brands in these countries.
We interviewed factory managers in Bangladesh.
We interviewed workers, stakeholders, and so on.
So we got a pretty comprehensive picture
of what happened in the few years
after that disaster in this industry.
And I will talk very briefly now just about some findings.
And of course, I'm happy to answer more in the discussion.
So from this whole research effort,
where we also sort of triangulated and compared
what are the companies doing, how it trickles down
to the workers, and so on.
In terms of improvements, well, it's a mixed picture.
We did see that buyer-supplier relations have shifted a bit
from still quite footloose, in the sense
that there was quite low commitment from buyers
to their suppliers towards more long-term, which
had to do with particularly one initiative that
was founded shortly after the Accord for Fire and Building
Safety in Bangladesh, which I will talk about a little bit
more, a binding agreement to do something
about the building structure, which
came with commitments to keep purchasing from suppliers
in Bangladesh.
So this has changed buyer-supplier relations
a little bit.
The suppliers would also say they
have benefited from these more long-term commitments.
But the big problem is that the suppliers' profit margins
actually declined because purchasing prices kept
declining as well.
So suppliers feel very much squeezed
in between tightened demands for investments and building
structure, compliance with codes, and so on,
while at the same time, purchasing prices fall even
more.
So not a good situation for them.
In terms of the companies, there were some changes, too,
in the way they approached this issue.
And because we interviewed so many,
there was a bit of a mixed bag.
Of course, we had some companies in our sample
that really didn't do very much at all,
maybe had a code of conduct, but no real procedures behind it.
And those companies were shifted,
we'd say, to a baseline level of taking better care of their
supply chain.
So the least thing they would have done
is implement stricter auditing of suppliers
and actually getting some transparency over their supply
chains because some didn't even, they just
delegated it to intermediaries and didn't really
know what was going on.
We also had very progressive firms that, as I mentioned,
were already members of multi-stakeholder initiatives
and so on.
So these firms really moved into supporting
political advocacy and supporting
more collective agreements like the court.
But this is just a small part.
So the majority of the firms, we would say, well,
they have created what we call enhanced climate
for compliance.
So they take this compliance issue much more seriously
than before.
But compliance still is very much, it doesn't change much
about the basic structure of the supply chain itself.
It just puts additional pressure on the suppliers
basically to more strictly comply with the code of conduct.
But little is done to actually make life easier for them.
And when it comes to the workers, also, it's a mixed bag.
Some things definitely have improved,
at least in the larger export-oriented factories
in Bangladesh.
That's always an important disclaimer.
Health and safety has clearly improved.
Job security has improved because of these more long term
commitments.
And workers tend to feel more secure in the factories
and also better informed about their rights.
So definitely this has had some impact.
But again, the basic working conditions
like wages, working hours, and also the way workers are treated
have not changed at all.
So very marginal.
Well, it depends on which perspective you take.
Definitely improvements, but not what
we would expect as a sort of game changer
in the way the industry operates.
Here are just some quotes from the workers speaking.
So they would say, yes, if we see a crack on the wall,
now we know we can speak up.
We have been watching videos, learning about rights
and safety issues and so on, just things
they weren't aware of before.
But then someone said, labor law training, no.
So for us to learn to demand our collective rights
and collective organization, collective bargaining,
one of the core labor standards would
result in us getting fired.
So these core labor standards are still not enforced.
And then I think this is a very powerful quote.
One worker actually says things have deteriorated for them.
Because they say before things were manageable,
they were strict about absences and leave.
But now, because the factory is under higher pressure
to comply, so she says, yes, we have higher wages.
But the pressure has gone up.
The control has gone up.
We can't be absent.
We can't pause.
We can't leave our workstation.
We can't go to the toilet.
They've installed cameras.
So because suppliers are under this double squeeze
of stricter compliance and falling purchasing prices,
this pressure is passed down directly to the workers.
So at the end, what we concluded, like I said,
there are lots more details and findings, is that, well,
I mean, as one worker says, the abuse starts at the top
and gets pushed down to each lower level.
And that's really what we see when
we bring all these different findings together.
So of course, workers blame their managers and the factories.
The factory managers blame the buyers who don't pay enough
purchasing prices.
And the buyers blame the competitors.
So these garment brands, they also
feel like they're driven by the market.
They don't want to squeeze workers.
They don't want bad stuff to happen in their supply chain.
But they say, and I think in many cases,
it's convincing, the market pressure is so high,
their profit margins are so low that they also
feel very little leeway to change anything
about the business.
So at the end, we have a huge collective action problem
that clearly cannot be solved by unilateral corporate behavior,
because all these corporate actors themselves
feel driven by these extremely strong market pressures.
And one of our companies in Germany, actually, they said,
and this for us was a very important quote,
they said, well, actually, all these initiatives,
the pressure we get from regulators,
they come from the Ministry of Development.
The Germans will know Minister Müller,
Minister of Development, who's been pushing also
for the supply chain.
They come maybe from the Ministry of Labor.
So Minister Heil, who's pushing it.
But the Ministry of Economics, no, they
are just supporting the free trade machine.
And there, they actually provide the rules of the game,
because we're businesses.
So they say, well, actually, the regulators
should decide what are the rules of our game.
If they want us to act responsibly,
then they need to provide a regulatory framework for it.
And that we found very interesting,
because it really shows, OK, this idea of we
on a corporate level voluntarily cannot solve this problem.
Something needs to be changed on the regulatory level,
on the industry level.
Now, for those of you studying MSIs,
maybe this is interesting.
Now, there's one development we already saw in this data.
And I've just mentioned the accord.
If we look at that more systematically,
there is some shift away from voluntary action.
And we've come up with this matrix
that says, OK, so on the one hand, we have the access of,
OK, there are single firms who do individual initiatives
towards collectives of firms that do something together,
like in multi-stakeholder initiatives.
But there's another axis, which is very important when it comes
to labor issues, which is the role of trade unions,
so collective worker representatives.
And what we have seen in the first phase of CSR
is very much on the left-hand side of this axis.
So unilateral firm level codes of conduct
and industry-led initiatives.
They're collectives, but they're totally industry-led,
like the business or social compliance initiative.
Towards a shift on the right hand,
and here the accord falls into place.
And the right hand is very important
because unions are included.
And what does that mean?
Unions, we argue, are not just any stakeholder.
They're actually different from NGOs.
Why?
Because unions become partners on the bargaining table.
They co-sign agreements with these corporations
that have some kind of binding character.
How binding it really is, the legal scholars
can answer better.
There's some contestation around it,
but it is more binding than a sort of voluntary commitment
a multi-stakeholder initiative makes.
Because there is a second partner on the bargaining table
and there is a contract that has been signed
between these two parties.
There are unilateral agreements, again,
that's on the lower quadrant.
The global framework agreements, maybe you've heard about them.
So single corporations co-signing them
with a single trade union.
And what Rala Plaza really has leveraged
as a sort of real novelty is a collective kind of what
we call transnational industrial relations agreement
together with trade unions.
So the court, now I say a few more words about it,
is a contract and agreement signed by over 200 brands
at the end together with two global union federations,
which very clearly outlines it was signed for five years
a plan for basically auditing all the factories in Bangladesh,
making sure any building safety issues are fixed,
entailing commitments by brands to keep purchasing
in Bangladesh, and several further aspects.
So the installation of worker participation committees
and so on and so forth.
It was quite a comprehensive agreement.
And many, and I will talk about that now in a little bit more,
for many CSR managers in particular,
that was a bit of a game changer.
So this whole experience of being part in that agreement,
of being cooperating with their competitors
on this large scale.
So yes, there were MSIs before, but there were only a few
brands that were really part of MSI.
Now here we're talking 200 brands,
brands that have never been in any kind
of collective initiative together with the trade unions.
And that really spurred a sense in the industry like,
oh, this is how we can maybe solve these problems
that so far we haven't been able to solve.
So this shift towards more binding regulation
is something that we really have seen.
And the accord, it has been renewed,
and then it had to be stopped because it was contested mainly
from local actors in Bangladesh.
Now there's again a renewal accord.
So these agreements are not solutions forever.
They're very contested, of course,
and they need continuous sort of work to keep them in place.
And there was a second initiative, this ACT,
what you see the logo here, that was formed by brands that
were already progressive, but some also newcomers who
felt this experience in the accord so fruitful
that they said, OK, let's take this model,
this governance model, to address other issues.
And ACT is for living wages.
They said, OK, wages is the same thing, collective problem.
We cannot solve it on a single corporate level.
Let's do something like we know from collective bargaining
in our national context on a transnational level.
Let's get the unions on board.
Let's sign an agreement.
So a real shift in thinking away from this voluntary CSR
approach.
OK, so final part.
What are we working on right now,
and where do the human rights come in?
Now, in a paper we're currently working on,
we're unraveling what I've just said
in a sort of institutional theory lens,
and we've also talked before about the role of theory.
So here you see maybe where it's useful.
And there's this concept of institutional logics,
which is a very sociological concept.
So it doesn't talk about the regulatory institutions
per se, but institutional logics is more sort
of the socially constructed pattern of practices,
ideas, meanings, and understandings
that sort of prescribe and give meaning to social action.
And institutional scholars would say, OK,
there are actually seven logics that govern our whole life.
There's sort of coherent systems of meanings,
understandings.
Regulatory institutions would be part of that,
but logics is much bigger, because the logics also
embody the values and the meanings
given to certain things.
So seven logics, the state, the family, the corporation,
the community, the religion, the market, and the professions.
And responsible management, here we
draw an article, could also be seen as a new logic,
an emerging logic, which is actually
at the interface of the market, the corporation,
the professions, and the community.
And unraveling this whole problem
in institutional logics lens really led us to see, OK,
so if responsible management is an emerging logic,
what does it stand up against?
It stands up against the market logic.
And the market logic totally permanates everything
these corporations in this industry are doing.
And the business case, what I just said before,
just is an indicator of how dominant the market logic is.
So for corporations, thinking about responsible management
only makes sense if they think about it in a market logic
terms.
It needs to pay off.
So we've looked at our data and also
at the literature with this institutional logic lens.
And we found lots of studies that actually
show this kind of what we see as a David and Goliath situation.
So Goliath is the market logic that pervades everything
corporations do.
All the practices are market oriented.
It permeated in our interviews because they kept emphasizing
the competitive market, the competitive market,
the competitive market.
We have to be competitive.
And there's this little David of responsible management
that is trying to gain a space in here.
And there's so much evidence that, OK,
CSR managers try a lot of things.
But whatever they do, it becomes sort of marginalized.
Because business as usual pushes back.
So in a sense, the corporate business demands always
trump the responsibility concerns.
And one could even say this on a field level.
Because the multi-stakeholder initiatives,
if you count them as part of voluntary CSR,
they're also, in a sense, infused with the market logic.
And they support this retreat of government policy
because they sort of imply, yes, we can solve this on our own.
So the challenge really becomes how
to shape this new logic of responsible management
in a way that it is not infused with market,
and thereby enabling new practices.
And this shift that started with the court
sort of can be interpreted in that way.
And that's also how the human rights language comes in.
So here, to address this issue, the research question
they're currently looking at, so how are CSR managers?
They're the one working at the interface of these subjects.
They're the one trying to be responsible,
but they keep getting pushbacks from the purchasing people,
from the top management, from the sheer market realities,
in a sense.
So how do they shape the meanings and practices
of responsible management in the context
of the dominant market logic?
And we've used a subset of our project data
to really unpack what was going on.
And again, I'll be brief.
So what we found by looking at a sample of 20 firms in detail
was really we could identify three approaches
towards addressing these conflicting
logics in this industry post-Rana Plaza.
That has to be said, because maybe the first approach is
actually surprising that it's still there.
So the first approach is basically prioritizing
the market logic.
So there was a bunch of firms, not many,
but some that would still deflect
any kind of responsibility.
They say it's not our responsibility
if something happens in the supplier countries.
It's their government's responsibility.
We have nothing to do with it, which
is surprising given 20 years of contestation and pushback
these companies have received.
The most common approach was the second one,
which were sincere attempts to accommodate,
as we would say, responsibility within the market logic.
So here we have these CSR managers
pushing for all kinds of voluntary CSR initiatives,
pushing for stricter auditing machines,
pushing for something like a veto right on supplier
selection based on their criteria and so on.
But here we can come back to the quote
that I showed with the Rana Plaza picture.
These CSR managers are saying, well, all of this,
we've done 20 years of heavy work on this,
but it's just not working.
And a small set of firms then are
trying to shift the approach.
By saying, OK, we need to do something
to be able to prioritize responsibility.
And they do this.
That's our analysis here in pre-competitive spaces.
So there's a lot of language where they say, well,
we need to take safety out of the competition.
We need to take wages out of the competition.
And the accord was sort of their primary model
of how this could be done.
Because it was collective, it was an agreement.
Everyone had to do it.
And in that sense, it was taken out of the competition.
You could not compete anymore on working
with a factory with lower safety standards,
because all factories for all the buyers
had to have those safety standards.
And this sort of classic collective bargaining
that I mentioned is exactly such a pre-competitive space.
So we know this in Western countries, of course,
for a long time.
Wages in some sectors are taken out of the competition
through collective bargaining to prevent
that companies undercut each other on the basis of wages.
In this transnational global supply chain space,
this is really a novelty.
So this is sort of what we find interesting here
as an attempt to shape a new approach
from responsible management that becomes more detached
from the market logic.
That's what we graphically tried to depict.
They're trying to take it out of the market logic.
And that happens through pre-competitive spaces,
small scale issues, focusing on one issue at a time,
like safety, like wages.
And on that issue, create what we call then
a binding infrastructure, a regulatory infrastructure,
that really supports this through stricter control
and enforcement mechanisms than we would see in voluntary CSR.
So we would say this pre-competitive space
to that allows prioritizing responsibility
is a new approach to responsible management.
It sees, it starts to propel competition.
Before it was always taken for granted.
That's the discursive layer of our analysis here.
It becomes being problematized as something
that needs to be actively controlled and restrained.
It sees responsible management as a collective issue
and not as an individual corporate issue.
It draws heavily on this emerging human rights discourse
and the emerging due diligence legislation.
It has been very important.
And it works really towards forging these sectoral agreements
together with unions.
With a basic idea of creating a binding framework
where specific labor issues are taken out of the competition.
So some more quotes to finish up.
I think I've said this,
or openly recognizing the limits of voluntary CSR
was really the basis for pushing for this new approach.
This frustration also for 20 years,
we've been doing CSR,
but it's just not going to make a change.
So this is CSR managers just growing really frustrated.
And in this new approach,
which was very much driven by the experience with the court,
you see a new language here.
So first quote, what usually happens,
the branch will say, oh yes, it's a problem,
but there's no legally binding contract.
But this time what happened if you signed the court,
it was five years and you couldn't just pull out.
So the binding nature of the court.
Or in the second quote,
if we want to address human rights issue,
it's through worker voice.
It has to be industry by it.
It has to be through collective bargaining.
It needs to be collective.
Or in the final quote,
I think the UN guiding principles,
there's been a tipping point where businesses realized
that human rights were pre-competitive.
It wasn't something that business should be competing on
and so on.
Yeah, so we have millions of quotes
that all point in this direction,
but it's really striking to see this difference
between firms that are sort of understanding
this as a new way and the rest.
And what's interesting here is of course,
the CSR managers role in this,
but also then the wider context.
And I want to finish with that.
So of course this is heavily contested.
So what we think what these CSR managers are trying to do
is really two things.
One, they're pushing the responsibility back up
to the field level,
away from the corporation.
They're saying we cannot solve this conflict
on a corporate level.
We need to change the rules of the game.
And they're really trying to push responsible management
out of the market infused logic.
And here they draw heavily on the sort of legal language
on the human rights language,
also the lawsuits that have been put in place,
which helps them to create a new understanding as a right.
Not as something that needs to pay off,
but as a right that should not be questioned
and that needs to be protected.
And then the question comes about,
so what is the kind of infrastructure
we need to protect these rights?
And one answer to that can be collective binding agreements
like the accord.
Of course, Rana Plaza has been a big enabler of that.
And we also see that those firms that had in place,
these very complex CSR infrastructures already,
they were the ones most frustrated
and they were the ones most likely
to embrace this kind of new approach.
But there are of course pushbacks, as I mentioned,
the accord that had to be stopped.
So these pre-competitive spaces,
what we see in this industry, they're very fragile.
They may be just in place temporarily.
And of course, it's an important question to look at,
does this model hold?
Can they be stabilized?
Can they even be extended?
That's the vision of some of these CSR managers to say,
oh, we have this model.
What we did in Bangladesh, we can do in other countries.
What we did for building safety, we can do for wages.
We can do for environmental issues.
So the potentiality is there,
but the question is given the pushback,
the market logic still dominant,
will this actually materialize?
So in conclusion, the human rights language
and the principles potentially enabled the forging
of a new understanding of responsible management,
taking it out of this realm of voluntarilyness.
But, and given the continued dominance of the market logic,
it's sort of unrealistic to expect
that it will be deinstitutionalized,
but these pre-competitive spaces that are sort of narrow,
focused on specific issues,
bound by rules, regulations, contracts,
might be a promising way forward
to prioritize responsibility concerns,
at least on a sort of smaller scale and for some issue.
Rana Plaza clearly acted as a catalyst,
and it's of course not a sustainable way forward
if you always need a big disaster like that.
And what I just mentioned, further research is needed
if this is actually something that can be transferred
or seen in other industries and sectors too,
or if it's just unique to the garment industry.
And I want to end with that.