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1. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Duane Windsor Developing a Global Regime for Human Rights
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This paper examines prospects for and content of a global regime for human rights. Competing schools of thought forecast convergence and divergence of national standards under stress of globalization. No such regime exists, and there is no compelling theory of international corporate social responsibility. However, elements of an emerging global regime can be identified and partially overlap with environmental protection issues. This regime is highly fragmented, underdeveloped, and only partially enforceable—but it is in development. The UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), ISO 26000 (expected in 2010), the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of 1789 and the permanent international criminal court established in 2002 are illustrations of such elements. The third Ruggie Report, issued 2008, is an important summary of conditions and proposes a strategy for forward progress. Human rights impose important obligations on multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating across highly diverse political, legal, and cultural realities.
2. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
M. Gunawan Alif, Retno Artsanti Nutrition for Kids Was Good for the Company: Lesson From JAPFA4Kids Nutrition Campaign
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Indonesia is developing greater opportunities for CSR activities, along with some obstacles and constraints. Unlike the Western world, one of the important drivers of CSR in this country is the importance of avoiding conflict. The agribusiness company JAPFA is very keen to promote CSR activities, not only to benefit the needy, but also for the survival of the organization in a very dynamic and turbulent market. This study elaborates how the JAPFA CSR program benefited the community around the company’s strategic business unit operations, and what kind of return the company received. To give a wider perspective on CSR activities in Indonesian organizations,the study also investigates employee commitment to JAPFA, its corporate culture, and employee attitudes toward social responsibility.
3. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Adli Juwaidah, Ruksana Banu Management Style and Decisions from the Perspective of Cultural Differences: A Study with Special Reference to the Sultanate of Oman
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It is common today that organizations have their own distinctive cultures, even in cases when they may not have willfully attempted to create them. Rather, cultures have most likely been created unconsciously, forced by the values of top level managers, the founder, or core people who have built or direct the organization. Leaders frequently attempt to change the culture of their organizations to suit their own preferences. The resulting culture will influence the decision-making process, market demand, and nature of the business. It affects management styles and what everyone determines as success. This study is an attempt to discover how culture influences management styles and decisions, with special reference to the local environment in Oman.
4. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Michael Funke Rawlsian Primary Goods and CSR: The Case of PT Freeport in Papua New Guinea
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John Rawls defines “primary social goods” to be the benefits of social co-operation that are valuable no matter what one’s life-plan. The benefit for international trade of talking in terms of primary goods is that such goods represent a fixed or standard rate, and thus facilitate efficient negotiation. The difficulty, however, is that such discussions appear to ignore, and thereby do violence to, significant cross-cultural value differences. I argue that an appropriate view of Rawlsian primary goods helps to facilitate inter-subjective agreement about what constitutes an advantage to the least advantaged. I illustrate this in a case study of the PT Freeport mining operations in Papua New Guinea.
5. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Lovasoa Ramboarisata Cooperative Values as Potential Hypernorms: Evidence from Large Cooperative Banks
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In this paper I argue that large cooperative organizations, in particular cooperative banks, are better positioned than business firms to be ethically responsible, global citizens. These organizations include cooperative networks in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, provident societies in the United Kingdom, and Mouvement des caisses populaires Desjardins and credit unions in Canada. Large cooperatives are distinct from firms but compete with them and are major socio-economic actors in their respective communities. They are more predisposed to implement policies that are compatible with local expectations and simultaneously reflect fundamental macro-social principles or hypernorms. The advantage of these particular economic organizations springs from their institutional and historical background, and particularly from the cooperative values on which they are founded and which make them different from firms.
6. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Byron Kaldis Transnationals and Corporate Responsibility: A Polythetic View of Moral Obligation
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This paper proposes a model of transnational corporations that calls for a non-unitary normative approach to ground the kind of corporate social responsibility that must, maximally, be ascribed to them. This involves injecting the notion of moral obligation into the picture, a particularly strict notion with an equally rigorous set of requirements that is not normally expected to be applicable to the case of big business operating internationally. However, if we are to be honest about the prospects of establishing a viable regime of international justice in conditions of globalized economies, the litanies of half-measures, wishful thinking, and lame excuses for nottackling the responsibilities of multinationally operating economic units will obviously lead us nowhere. Neither will any lists of principles of a voluntary global compact type, nor the intuitions of business ethics writers, be of any help either. We must go back to the historical kernel of ethical systems, identify key concepts, and ascertain for which particular issues raised by the operation of transnationals each such concept best delivers the corresponding moral obligation, thus silencing the traditional realist worry that the international arena is, logically, a Hobbesian state of nature. My proposal rests on the idea that transnationals are polythetic organisms,both internally and externally, that require a corresponding multi-positioned ethical approach to cover their overlapping operating units.
7. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Grant Walton Rifling Through Corruption’s Baggage: Understanding Corruption Through Discourse Analysis
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This paper examines several primarily academic discourses on corruption to demarcate the assumptions embedded within each one. It begins by discussing different definitions of corruption, which leads to an identification of five prominent discourses on the subject that are examined in some detail. The paper concludes by considering some implications of this analysis.
8. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Preface
9. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Aigul Maidyrova, Baurzhan Esengeldi, Aidana Sariyeva Social Responsibility of Business in Kazakhstan
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This article studies the possibility of forming social policy, and in particular policies for social security, through the participation of domestic business. By taking on social responsibility, business can eventually, of own its own accord, offer the state and society its assistance in dealing with social problems. In Kazakhstan, a major part of business people see their responsibility as many-sided, consisting of duties to employees, consumers, business partners, the local community, and the country as a whole. They acknowledge responsibility along three dimensions: financial, ecological, and social.
10. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Simeon Obidairo International Framework of Corporate Liability for Transnational Corruption: A Case Study of the OFFP and BAE Scandal
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The revelation of widespread corruption in the Oil-for-Food Programme (the “Programme”) and the recent scandal involving the British arms manufacturer BAE Systems threatens to unravel the fragile global consensus on combating corruption. This paper outlines the emerging global consensus and legal framework on corruption and assesses the extent to which this consensus has been undermined by the above mentioned revelations of corruption. Both incidents provide an interesting context in which to analysesome of the difficult issues presented in the regulation of transnational corruption. The regulation of transnational corruption provides a framework for analyzing the critical dimensions of the interaction between the norms in various domestic communities and the transnational context of these interactions. The paper argues that the current framework of multilateral efforts to curb transnational corruption is unable to tackle the problem effectively and concludes that the liability framework for engaging in transnational corruption has almost exclusively been the result of political expediency rather than that of empirical information. By examining the multilateral efforts by the international community to combat corruption, the paper generates questions about the status and future direction of thefight against corruption under international law.
11. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 4
Betty Dee Makani-Lim, Felix Chan Lim Global Players in the Local Field: Changing Corporate Practices in Response to the Local Culture
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For the most part, the primary driver for international businesses in establishing operations in other countries is the reduction of overall operating costs. Host countries, especially developing nations, welcome multinational corporations (MNCs) because of the perceived economic benefits that international businesses can bring to their local communities. Surprisingly, one of the most understudied, under-analyzed, and sometimes even completely neglected factors when international businesses consider setting up shop in other countries is the local culture of their chosen destination country. This paper substantiates the thesis that international businesses should adapt their corporate practices to the local cultures in which they operate to achieve effective and superior businessperformance. The paper goes further in identifying corporate practices that were adapted or revised by international businesses to respond to the culture of local communities in the Philippines.
12. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Nada Kobeissi Foreign Investment in the Mena Regions: Analyzing Nontraditional Determinants
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Although there is substantial literature examining the flow of foreign investments into various regions of the world, there is still a lack of research about joint ventures and foreign investment activities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). One objective of this paper is to remedy this neglect and extend previous empirical work by focusing on foreign investments in the MENA region. The second objective is to focus on non-traditional determinants that have tended to be overlooked or underestimated in previous research. The increasing globalization has led to a reconfiguration of the ways in which multinationals pursue various types of foreign investments,and changed the motives for and the determinants of FDI. This has prompted some to suggest that non traditional determinants have become more important. In view of that, the paper will focus on factors such as governance, legal environment, and economic freedom and examine their impact on foreign investment activities in the MENA region.
13. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Runa Sarkar Environmental Initiatives at Tata Steel: Green-Washing or Reality? A Case Study of Corporate Environmental Behavior
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The firm has an overwhelming role in sustainable development, and this paper identifies what influences a firm’s management of the business-environment interface. This is done through an in-depth case study of the environmental behavior of Tata Steel, India’s largest and oldest integrated steel plant. The Indian regulatory environment is one of strict (and sometimes contradictory) laws and slack enforcement. This paper examines the inclination of a firm in this context to commit to pollution abatement and honor its commitment by achieving long-run improvement in its environmental performance. Environmental responses studied include compliance withexisting norms, involvement in voluntary schemes, and implementation of environmental management programs. Other responses examined are investment in pollution prevention strategies, adoption of cleaner technologies, taking adversarial positions against regulators vs. working with them to develop regulations, influencing environmental policy, and meeting and/or exceeding stakeholder expectations. This paper analyzes Tata Steel’s reactive and proactive responses and generalizes some of its conclusions to firms indeveloping countries.
14. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Duane Windsor Formulating a Moral Core for International Codes of Conduct
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A moral core places ethical considerations superior to business interest. This core must include voluntary prescriptions in various forms to “buy higher, sell lower.” International business ethics must somehow address the tradeoff between corporate financial and stakeholder interests. Corporation codes of conduct generally do not define a moral core. Corporate citizenship is typically strategic investment in markets and reputation. There are two practical paths for formulating a moral core. One path is civil lawsuits against multinationals that, successful or not, increase corporate moral sensitivity. The other path is evolution of multilateral codes of conductembedding negotiated norms for guidance of corporate behavior. Four key cases illustrate: (1) World Bank approach for combating corruption in Chad; (2) a lawsuit against Unocal alleging human rights abuses by Myanmar; (3) a lawsuit against ChevronTexaco alleging environmental and community damages in Ecuadorian Amazonia; and (4) demand by developing countries for relaxing intellectual property rights.
15. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Pegram Harrison Corporate Social Responsibility: An Information Strategy
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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) continues to evolve as an important paradigm for business strategy. There is much disparate information about it available; evaluating that information and deciding what applies to any given organisation is thus becoming a more complicated task. With an idea to simplifying this process, the Sustainable Development Unit at the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) considered how it might position itself as an information filter for CSR generally. The research summarised here concludes that CSR is too large and vague a concept to be practical or applicable, and suggests that an international organisation such as RIIA should concentrate on creating opportunities for focusing the idea, rather than actually attempting to effect practical change. Whether these opportunities emerge out of discussion, analysis, research, policy briefings, or by other means, will depend on the nature and timing of any specific topic within the overall CSR context.
16. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Jacob Park Beyond Good Intentions: New Directions for Investing in Sustainability
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This paper examines the rise of socially responsible investment (SRI) as a sustainable finance mechanism and discusses the potential of SRI in steering the banking and financial services industry toward a more socially responsible and environmentally sound model of commerce. I argue in this paper that the potential of SRI to serve as a sustainable business mechanism to steer the global financial market toward a new ethical architecture depends on two related factors: (a) continuing institutional and social pressures forgreater corporate transparency, and (b) the ability of SRI to become a viable financial instrument outside its traditional markets in emerging and developing economies.
17. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Adedayo O. Adeyemi, M. H. Ayegboyin The Use of Information and Communication Technologies for Providing Access to HIV/AIDS Information Management in a Resource-Poor Country: Nigeria, A Case Study
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We investigate the growing use of information and communication technology in Nigeria and its potential as a tool to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic through information management. Potential applications include data gathering for research and disease tracking, knowledge sharing, and dissemination of information on research findings, prevention methods, available care and support, and patient rights. The research is based on 1450 responses to a widely distributed questionnaire.
18. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
William Flanagan, Gail Whiteman “AIDS is Not a Business”: A Study in Global Corporate Responsibility
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Most major pharmaceutical companies have corporate social responsibility policies that pledge their commitment to improving the health and quality of life of people around the world. Yet these same companies also have difficulty in ensuring that developing countries have access to affordable medications. In the late 1990s, Brazil engaged in a heated battle with large US-backed multinational pharmaceutical companies. Brazil was facing a growing HIV epidemic and was determined to provide treatment to those in need. This required massive price reductions on HIV medications. Although met with resistance, Brazil’s campaign eventually resulted in the negotiation of significant price reductions. Our study examines how Brazil was able to secure these price concessions. We conclude that corporate social responsibility initiatives must be viewed as a dynamic interaction between multiple actors. Our study highlights the importance of governmental action, in both the national and international forums, to negotiate pro-actively with companies to ensure that CSR commitments are met.
19. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
Albino Barrera Corporate Responsibility in Adverse Pecuniary Externalities: The Case of International Agricultural Subsidies
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The United States, Europe and Japan provide farm subsidies at a rate of one billion USD per day. The bulk of this is captured by large corporate entities. Damage to less developed countries is extensive and deep. Besides the farmers who are harmed because of the resulting lower agricultural prices, these negative effects ripple through the rest of the economy, due to the central importance of the agricultural sector for developing nations. Besides being direct beneficiaries of these subsidies, farming corporations, including their ancillary support industries, have lobbied heavily to resist the growing international clamor to remove or at least substantially alter thesesubsidies. This paper examines the economics and ethics of international corporate responsibility on the issue of farm subsidies.
20. International Corporate Responsibility Series: Volume > 2
John Hooker, Ans Kolk, Peter Madsen Preface