The cosmopolitan organization — an essay on corporate accountability

Abstract Transnational corporations increasingly seek to present a vision of social responsibility alongside the business vision. This reflects greater awareness of ‘the world as one single place’, of global risk scenarios, and the politics of doing business. There are also demands for greater transparency and accountability in corporate actions by state representatives, grassroots movements and organized consumers. Transnational corporations now aim to be socially responsible and to engage in ‘corporate citizenship’ by adhering to voluntary codes of conduct, social accountability standards, etc. This discourse of corporate accountability is part of a discourse of globality, or ‘globe talk’, a vital component of contemporary world culture, largely produced, diffused, and sustained by organizations with expansive ambitions of regulating global business; transnational corporations, business associations, international organizations, NGOs and INGOs. Awareness of the global nature of trade and capitalism, the associated risk scenarios, and the attempts at approaching something like a humane globalization by the setting up of ethics standards and codes of conduct, may be understood as a particular case of ‘worldism’. This ‘worldism’ is foundational, with universalizing and homogenizing claims. ‘Corporate citizenship’ and ‘accountability’ are therefore treated as a form of organizational culture that involves a particular kind of moral cosmopolitanism.     

Imagining new feminist futures: How feminist social movements contest the neoliberalization of feminism in an increasingly corporate‐dominated world

Increasingly it is argued that feminism has been co‐opted by neoliberal agendas: becoming more individualistic and losing touch with its wider social change objectives. The neoliberalization of feminism is driven in part by increased corporate power, including the growing role of corporations in governance arenas, and corporate social responsibility agendas. However, we turn to social movement theory to elucidate strategies that social movements, including feminist social movements, are adopting in such spaces. In so doing, we find that feminist activists are engaging with new political opportunities, mobilizing structures and strategic framing processes that emerge in the context of increasingly neoliberal and privatized governance systems. We suggest that despite the significant challenges to their agendas, far from being co‐opted by neoliberalism, feminist social movements remain robust, existing alongside and developing new strategies to contest the neoliberalization of feminism in a variety of innovative ways.     

The time and space of everyday life

This article argues that everyday life is related to all social relations and activities, including both the ‘official’ practices that are codified and normalized and the ‘unofficial’ practices and articulations of experience. Indeed, everyday day life is seen as the single plane of immanence in which these two forms of practice and articulation interrelate and affect one another. The lived experience of everyday life is multidimensional, composed of various social fields of practice that are articulated, codified and normalized to different degrees and in different ways (either officially or unofficially). Moving through these fields in daily life, we are aware of passing through different zones of time and space. There are aspects of everyday relations and practices more open to government, institutionalization, and official codification, while others are more resistant and provide the basis for opposition and social movements. Everyday life is a mixture of diverse and differentially produced and articulated forms, each combining time and space in a unique way. What we refer to as ‘institutions’ associated with the state or the economy are attempts to fix social practice in time and space – to contain it in specific geographical sites and codify it in official discourses. The relations and practices more often associated with everyday life – such as friendship, love, comradeship and relations of communication – are more fluid, open and dispersed across time and space. However, the two should not be uncoupled in social analysis, as they are necessarily interrelated in processes of social and political change. This is especially so in contemporary capitalism or, as Lefebvre called it, the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’.     

Isomorphism,Institutional Parochialism,and the Study of Social Movements

This study investigates whether the field of social movements is occupied by parochial concerns. Using a content analysis of two prominent journals that study social movements – Mobilization: An International Journal and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social and Political Protest – it was found that the field is dominated by the study of Western movements, but is also relatively ‘worldly’ when compared to other academic sub-disciplines. Much work on the ‘global south’ is conducted by scholars who maintain personal associations and connections to regions of the world outside of the West. In addition, it was found that social movement scholars focus predominantly on the study of liberal movements as compared to conservative movements. The types of movements most commonly studied are also examined.     

Citing history

ABSTRACT

Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of ‘wish images’ and ‘dialectical images,’ their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women’s Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march’s route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to ‘improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.’     

Bringing the Outside In: Field Interaction and Transformation from Below in Political Struggles

This article applies field theory in order to build an understanding of aspects of social movements practice. It argues that the way social movements are positioned within their various fields of practice and the way these fields inter-relate with each other can help explain how movements arrive at their strategies and ideologies. The relationship between the fields within which social movements operate also provides a means to explain how movement participants can become agents for change.

The article discusses the case of British Jewish Israel-critical groups, an example of a movement suspended between several different fields of practice – both local and distant. The internal movement debate around boycotting Israel illustrates how movement activities are channelled by the local fields within which they contend. Their relationship with the distant Palestinian field demonstrates the importance of the influence of external fields in forming social movement ideology. This model views social movement actors – especially those within distant issue movements – as translators between various fields of practice. This provides a mechanism to explain how challengers within a field can overcome the limitations of internal field habitus and become agents for field transformation.     

Cooptation and non-cooptation: elite strategies in response to social protest

ABSTRACT

The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it demonstrates that cooptation appears rational only on the condition that cooperation is valued lower than political domination. But elite-movement interaction may result in mutually strategic relationships that are conditional on each side’s recognition of the other’s interest. Two empirical cases illustrate this possibility: the US Civil Rights Movement and Latin American participatory budgeting. In both cases, the actors involved chose a strategy of ‘mutually assured autonomy’ over cooptation.     

Corporate interests within transnational advocacy networks: The International Coalition Against Plain Packaging

Most of the research on transnational advocacy networks documents progressive, voluntary movements, motivated by values associate with human rights and public goods. There is little critical reflection on the role of corporations within such networks or on the material motivations behind movements. Meanwhile literature on corporate political strategies related to partnerships with civil society is limited to national level analysis. This article presents a case study of the International Coalition Against Plain Packaging, which is conceptualized as a transnational advocacy network, and documents its links to the tobacco industry. We find that, not only have tobacco companies provided network members – publicly presented and perceived as independent – with financial resources, but they have also been involved in producing the information used by the network to debate the benefits of plain packaging. In return, the tobacco industry is able to propagate ideas favorable to its interests through organizations perceived as legitimate experts, and to maintain a network of allies ready to counter tobacco control regulations when and where they arise. Considering the multiple benefits corporations might derive from engaging with transnational advocacy networks, there is need for greater research on private actors’ influence within advocacy networks and on those networks that aim to counter or advance alternatives to progressive ideals.     

Corporate sustainability as a hegemonic discourse of globalization: The discourse-historical approach as a critical issues and stakeholder analysis tool

Corporate social responsibility, and its other conceptual variants such as corporate sustainability, encourages businesses to act on a range of issues outside what the law and shareholders require. But what are the limits of the concept and its discursive practices in a globalizing world marked by accentuated asymmetrical power relations between businesses, and the communities they operate in and serve (especially corporations working in less powerful global peripheries), and the regulators who are expected to police them? This study uses the discourse-historical approach (DHA) and corporate sustainability framework (CSF) to analyze a British independent oil production firm’s—Tullow—communication. It illustrates the utility of the DHA and the CSF for doing critical stakeholder and issues analysis from corporate communication texts. Second, it argues that corporate sustainability illustrates the power asymmetry between the global and local, corporations and community. Specifically, we observe how a petroleum firm uses sustainability discourse, as a form of hegemonic globalization, to perpetuate dominant tropes and conceptions about African local communities as homogeneous and lacking agency, commodifying the lived experiences of the locals in the process while entrenching the superiority of the firm’s own position as a ‘benevolent dictator.’ We also illustrate how particular mitigation and intensification discourse techniques are employed to uphold Tullow as a ‘do-good’ actor. The corporation’s discursive strategies have a cumulative effect of cementing the power asymmetry that already exists between the firm as an agent of a dominant center of global power and Ghanaian communities as less powerful interests in the globalization process. Suggestions for disrupting the hegemony are provided.     

Is there a European social work identity?

The aim of this paper is to examine whether at this point in time the notion of a ‘European social work identity’ can be sustained. The paper commences with some brief consideration of theories of identity, and particularly draws attention to social constructionist identity theory, highlighting its focus on identity as a process. Ideas about what constitutes ‘collective identity’ are then examined. From this, two particular models of collective identity are presented which are helpful for understanding cultural identities. These are the more ‘traditional’ notion of collective culture being evidenced by the presence of shared histories and traditions, and the more social constructionist view of collective processes and action to form identities – whether imposed by the state or generated by the people – as constitutive of identities in themselves. ‘European identity’, and then ‘European social work identity’, will then be examined using these models of collective identity. The paper concludes that using social constructionist versions of identity (identity as a process of collectivisation), European social work identity can certainly be established.     

Making Sense of Social Change: Observing Collective Action in Networked Cultures

This article presents an overview of rising trends in the study of networked interactions conveyed by social media technologies and the emergence of new meanings associated with social change. In recent years, a healthy amount of studies has focused on ICT uses within collective action, considering social media tools to have become crucial components of many transnational movements and social change projects. Crossing boundaries between social movements theories, political science, and communication studies, literature suggests that ‘online activism’ and increasingly networked interactions may have transformed the meanings and definitions associated with ‘collective action’ and ‘social change’. To make sense of these meanings, we identify three approaches used by scholars, which focus on (i) the actual networking of actors, (ii) the diffusion of new repertoires and frames through networks, and (iii) making sense of new meanings conveyed within networked cultures. We conclude by suggesting the need for more comprehensive research to better observe and make sense of how's actors define collective action and how they use social media tools when striving to convey social change.     

The insufficient imagery of top-down,bottom-up in global movements analysis

Scholars have shown various ways in which new types of transnational interdependence influence conflicts and resistance. Conventional conceptualization often depicts movements as emerging from the ‘bottom-up’ efforts of distinctive, individual collectives to challenge the ‘top-down’ hegemony of bureaucratic states, multinational corporations, and some international civil society organizations. But globalization scholars, and particularly those developing a framework of world society studies, place interactions among different levels of action and orientation at the center of conflict analysis and show how mobilization and change occurs across complex, interdependent relationships. In this article, I interrogate the different and often contradictory ways that dimensions of mobilization and social change are commonly denoted in this usage. I then explore alternative global theoretical frameworks that give greater explanatory power to the dynamic global–local interface. To move beyond the constraints of binary thinking in global movements analysis, I suggest that future scholarship clearly specify significant attributes of mobilization, identify how attributes vary and co-mingle, and locate social processes among a host of global–local relationships.     

Capitalism as a social movement: the corporate and neoliberal reconstructions of the American political economy in the twentieth century

This paper examines the ways in which social movements based among leading capitalists have remade the US political economy. In the first part we examine the period from the late 1880s through the 1920s, sketching the emergence of a hegemonic movement that accomplished the re-embedding of capitalist social relations during the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. In the second, we examine the disembedding of capitalist relations during the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper makes three major arguments. First, capitalists not just subaltern groups resort to collective action outside of institutional channels of authority and power. Second, during organic crises the movements of capitalists will join with movements of subaltern groups to create hegemonic projects, whose disparate supporters are articulated by discourses. Third, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself should be understood as a constituent part of a larger social formation and not sealed off from features of capitalism and the state. Indeed, hegemonic social movements have reconstructed the larger landscape that social movement theory normally takes for granted as a background. In applying this approach to the contested topic of neoliberalism, we argue that it was not primarily a class-based coup, a policy, ideology, or culture shift but a discourse that united elements of the left and the right as well as a ‘historic bloc’ with homes in both major parties. During both periods subaltern groups played an important role in the hegemonic movements that created corporate capitalism and later neoliberalism.     

How Social Movements Move: From First to Second Wave Developments in the UK Field of Psychiatric Contention1

In this paper I seek to unpack the notion of ‘movement’, addressing the question of what it means to say that social movements ‘move’. The concept of ‘movement’ is often used in social science to refer to change, I note, and this is clearly an appropriate usage in relationship to social movements, which often seek to bring about and/or manifest within themselves social changes. At the same time, however, movements move in the respect that the cultural forms and resources they generate are diffused (they move) across both time and space. The cultural components of a movement move in the way that, for example, a virus moves, between individuals in a ‘vulnerable’ population. The paper explores these ideas by way of an examination of the second wave of radical mental health activism in the UK.     

Mobile transitions: a conceptual framework for researching a generation on the move

This paper argues for a renewed research agenda on the transnational mobility of young people across both youth studies and migration studies. We review key literature across these fields, before arguing for a new conceptual framework that helps to further extend the emerging interdisciplinary space of ‘youth mobility studies’ (Raffaetà, Baldassar and Harris 2016). Our central proposition is that mobility has become an important marker and maker of transitions for youth in many contexts globally. We argue that a conceptual advance is required to understand the unique circumstances of a generation ‘on the move’ as they navigate diverse and non-sequential social, civic and economic practices of ‘adulthood’, and propose the conceptual framework of mobile transitions as a timely new agenda. ‘Mobile transitions’ describes transition pathways under conditions of mobility but also emphasises two key claims around the further development of transnational youth mobility research. The first is the importance of an orientation towards spatio-temporal complexity, multiplicity and fragmentation of both ‘youth transition’ and ‘migrancy’ as scholarly concepts and lived experiences. The second is an argument for understanding ‘mobile transitions’ in relation to three intersecting domains – economic opportunities, social relations and civic practices – rather than through linear notions of the achievement of economic and social autonomy.     

Motives of corporate political donations: industry regulation,subjective judgement and the origins of pragmatic and ideological corporations

What motivates corporate political action? Are corporations motivated by their own narrow economic self‐interest; are they committed to pursuing larger class interests; or are corporations instruments for status groups to pursue their own agendas? Sociologists have been divided over this question for much of the last century. This paper introduces a novel case – that of Australia – and an extensive dataset of over 1,500 corporations and 7,500 directors. The paper attempts to understand the motives of corporate political action by examining patterns of corporate political donations. Using statistical modelling, supported by qualitative evidence, the paper argues that, in the Australian case, corporate political action is largely motivated by the narrow economic self‐interest of individual corporations. Firms’ interests are, consistent with regulatory environment theory, defined by the nature of government regulation in their industry: those in highly regulated industries (such as banking) and those dependent on government support (such as defence) tend to adopt a strategy of hedging their political support, and make bipartisan donations (to both major parties). In contrast, firms facing hostile regulation (such as timber or mining), and those without strong dependence on state support (such as small companies) tend to adopt a strategy of conservative partisanship, and make conservative‐only donations. This paper argues that regulatory environment theory needs to be modified to incorporate greater emphasis on the subjective political judgements of corporations facing hostile regulation: a corporation's adoption of conservative partisanship or hedging is not just a product of the objective regulation they face, but also whether corporate leaders judge such regulation as politically inevitable or something that can be resisted. Such a judgement is highly subjective, introducing a dynamic and unpredictable dimension to corporate political action.     

A STAGE MODEL OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT CO-OPTATION: Community Mediation in the United States

The community mediation movement in the United States arose in the late 1970s as an alternative to a formalized justice system that was perceived to be costly, time consuming, and unresponsive to individual and community needs. Community mediation advocates also valued community training, social justice, volunteerism, empowerment, and local control over conflict resolution mechanisms. But over the past quarter century, community mediation has become increasingly institutionalized and has undergone various degrees of co-optation in its evolving relationship with the court system.
Drawing on the literatures of dispute resolution, co-optation, and social movements, we analyze the evolution of community mediation and identify the degrees and dimensions of its co-optation. Thus, we develop a four-stage model of co-optation as it has occurred within the community mediation movement, identifying multiple steps in each stage. This analysis facilitates greater understanding of specific events, particular processes, and individual decisions and dilemmas that mediation activists face in their working relationships with their communities and the formal legal system. Further, scholars studying similar processes in other social movements may find that this stage model of co-optation, in whole or in part, is useful to their analyses of other movements.     

The stranger the better: support and solidarity in the 2011 students’ protests in Chile

This paper analyses the legitimation dynamics of the student protests in Chile 2011, explaining how the support of ‘strangers’ strengthened its position and endurance. By analysing interviews with both activists and uninvolved citizens, I describe a steady pattern whereby they express the strength and legitimacy of the movement by assessing the ‘abstraction’ of the link between protesters and their supporters. The more abstract these relations – the stranger supporters are – the most relevant and meaningful is their support. Beyond establishing the worthiness of protesters’ claims, strangers provide protesters with a mandate, fostering the movement’s cohesion and thus affecting its ability to endure through the conflict. While the literature has mostly looked at adherents as only potential (or failed) constituents, I argue that support that remains external plays a crucial role in social movements’ chances of success. This support needs, however, to avoid being framed as insufficient engagement. Further analysis shows that the distinction between protesters and strangers often requires active boundary work, allowing the movement to maximize the benefits of strangers’ support while managing its risks. The relation between these boundaries, the efficiency of different contention tactics and their adaptation is analysed here. The study argues that strangeness can involve very different, even opposed phenomena, which are often confounded, namely ‘otherness’ and ‘abstraction’. Critically drawing upon Simmel, I explain how it is ‘abstraction’ in particular that helps our understanding of the role of strangers in social movements and consider how this distinction could enrich research on the symbolic aspects of contentious politics.     

Challenging Ethno-National Division: New Social Movements in Belfast

Literature on social movements in societies undergoing violent ethno-national conflict between two ‘warring factions’ has typically concentrated on civil rights, ethnic revivalists, peace and women's groups. This paper concentrates on two loose groupings – lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender, and ‘ban-the-bomb’ – that have been ignored. I argue that in the context of a ‘divided city’ like Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, these collective actors can be analysed as New Social Movements. Specifically, I look at how these new social movements have sought to experiment with forms of intercultural dialogue, expressive pluralistic communities which embrace unity through diversity and cosmopolitan, global identities which challenges the competitive, monolithic and divisive nationalisms which contribute to the sedimentation of violence and segregation of Irish Nationalists and British Unionists in the city.     

Networks of organizational learning and adaptation in retail TNCs

Abstract In this article we contribute to a growing body of literature concerned with the socio‐cultural dynamics of learning and adaptation inside firms. Specifically, we apply a ‘competence‐based’ view of the firm to a newly emerging breed of retail‐industry transnational corporations (TNCs). We situate these firms within the context of ‘relational networks’ and then consider – from a geographical perspective – the complex interplay between ‘extra‐firm’ networks and ‘intra‐firm’ networks, and between store‐based learning and organizational adaptation. We argue that the competitiveness of the retail TNC increasingly rests upon its ability to adapt the portfolio of retail formats to different and rapidly changing business environments by mobilizing and blending knowledge from multiple locations. This, it is suggested, is leading to the emergence of a ‘reflexive’ or ‘hybridized’ model of retail globalization.