Manufacturing amnesia: Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa

'Manufacturing amnesia' argues that the term 'Corporate Social Responsibility' has been abandoned by most South African firms in favour of the term 'corporate social investment'. This has been done in order to divert attention from calls on business to redress the results of its historical contribution to the apartheid system. The discourse of reconciliation has further served to erase memories of past corporate behaviour. It also masks continuing inequalities and unsustainable practices. Business has responded weakly to the pressures for CSR, of which five broad areas are identified and analysed. Voluntary sustainability initiatives have not succeeded and compliance with black economic empowerment charters and environmental standards have to be legislated and regulated. Firms need to reassess their legacies more honestly until which time their CSR contributions will be regarded as cosmetic and self-serving.     

The false developmental promise of Corporate Social Responsibility: evidence from multinational oil companies

Using the example of multinational oil companies, this article suggests that there are fundamental problems surrounding the capacity of private firms to deliver development and the aspiration of achieving development through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) may be fundamentally flawed. The article is based on an extensive twelve-month research project on the Gulf of Guinea region funded by the Nuffield Foundation. This research identified a number of constraints to a developmental role for CSR: the subservience of CSR schemes to corporate objectives; country- and context-specific issues; the failure to involve the beneficiaries of CSR; the lack of human resources; technical/managerial approaches of company staff and the lack of CSR's integration into larger development plans. But even if private companies were able to overcome practical problems, it argues that the current CSR agenda fails to address the crucial issues of governance and the negative macro-level effects that multinational companies cause in host countries. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on CSR may divert attention from broader political, economic and social solutions for developmental problems.     

Creative Copenhagen: Globalization,Urban Governance and Social Change

The introduction of 'creativity' and the 'creative city' in imagineering Copenhagen and in strategies for developing its urban competitiveness is analysed from a perspective on relations between processes of globalization, developments in urban government/governance and social geographic change. This perspective problematizes what on the surface seems to be an unequivocally positive quality ('creative') and goal ('creativity'). We argue there is a need to recognize the social costs of developments that are glossed over by the creative city rhetoric, including diminished representative democracy, social and geographic polarization and considerable displacement of the marginalized.     

全球化时代的社会史研究

历史科学是以热潮的方式前进的。有些人或许也会说,它是一个依赖于时尚的专业,但这样说就太消极了。因为,尽管提问、专题与研究领域以相当快的替换频率崛起、占据主要位置,然后又退居后位,人们在回顾时还是能够看到,它们有过长期性影响,产生了许多成果,哪怕起初对它们的期望与要求被证实为过高了。这有点像众所周知的荒漠考察队的故事,必须有一个海市蜃楼来吸引它,它才会向前挪进一段路。另外,如果我们对眼前发生并不断变化的当代重大问题以及新历史学者队伍的不同经历不做出反应的话,那么我们的专业会是多么枯燥无味!     

Plurality and Globalization: The Challenge of Economics to Social Theology

Abstract

The phenomenon of the global market economy, drawing as it does on ‘liberal’ concepts of plurality and the transcending of tradition, offers a serious challenge to social theology. Neither liberal nor communitarian (confessional) approaches are able to give adequate accounts of two fundamental economic problematics: scarcity and interrelatedness. Liberal approaches have tended to subordinate theological insights to secular narratives in ways which obscure distinctive contributions from the Christian tradition. Confessional approaches have not handled finitude or translatability between communities and traditions with sufficient subtlety. This article argues that an adequate social theology on the economy will bridge liberal and communitarian approaches in ways which are cognisant of the particularity of traditions yet open to encounter between them, and, drawing on MacIntyre, Shanks and Selby, among others, sketches the outlines of such a dialogic traditionalism.     

Responsibility,Humility, and Intervention

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of The Responsibility to Protect that is rooted in the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. R2P rests on three central claims: sovereignty ought to be understood in terms of responsibility rather than control, the just cause criterion for war should include humanitarian protection, and rightful authority ought to be relocated to multilateral institutions. In turn, Niebuhr’s Christian realism proposes a dialectic of responsibility and humility that shapes our understanding of justice and coercion. While examining R2P through a Niebuhrian lens shows some compatibility between the two moral frameworks, it also reveals the insufficient understanding of humility with respect to human motivations and limitations that underlies R2P’s criteria.     

(Mal)Development in Central America: Globalization and Social Change

This article develops a globalization framework and a model of transnational processes for analysing social change and development, and then applies the model to Central America. The analysis emphasizes determinacy, in the last instance, of social forces in historic developmental outcomes, and documents how social forces in struggles in an emergent transnational environment have shaped Central America's changing profile within the global economy and society. Revolutionary movements, a new class structure, US geo-political considerations, and the internationalization of East Asian economies, have all contributed to a new model of development; from the 1960s into the 1990s the national model of development is being replaced by a transnational model. Maquiladora garment production, tourism, non-traditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers are coming to eclipse traditional agro-exports as the most dynamic economic sectors linking the region to globalized circuits of production and distribution. The article also examines Central American migration to the US and gender dimensions of the new transnational model of development.     

Globalization,empire and natural law

Three controversial concepts are central to discussion on how international order originates, how it operates, and ultimately how we should respect it: globalization, empire and natural law. Each of these is examined in turn in this article. The currently prevalent way of thinking about globalization simply as a system of inter‐connections, of processes and networks that span national and cultural boundaries is likely to produce anti‐globalization backlashes. Many people reach the conclusion that global rules are simply a euphemism for some sort of imperial or neo‐imperial rule. Consequently, there is an increasingly intense discussion of the role of force and power in a global order. This article suggests an alternative mechanism for creating global order. The power of globalization rests not simply on material prosperity, but on the ability to communicate and share ideas as well as goods across large geographical and cultural distances. Natural law theories suggest that a sustained dialogue between apparently rival traditions of thinking can lead to agreement on shared norms and values.     

Social capital and poverty of the wage-labour class: problems with the social capital theory

Social capital, understood as norms of reciprocity and associational life, is supposed to provide a bottom-up approach to poverty alleviation world-wide. The World Bank says that social capital is a necessary condition for long-term development and that social capital is the capital of the poor. This paper will argue that much of the literature is too sanguine of the benefits of social capital for the poor. It is, of course, important to look at the extent to which social capital can help the poor. But how the conditions of the poor people can also affect their social capital is equally important to examine, and this has often been neglected by many scholars who have been busy to prove that social capital is a new paradigm of development. Based on qualitative interviews in two rural areas in Orissa, eastern India, this paper seeks to examine whether and to what extent poor people of the daily wage labour class benefit from their social capital. It then goes on to unpack the mechanisms in which the economic-political conditions under which poor people live and the spatiality of these conditions affect the production of social capital. By seeking to unpack the dialectical relation between social capital and poverty, the paper aims at problematizing the overly optimistic claims about social capital. It shows that it is untenable to posit social capital as an independent variable and poverty as a dependent variable because the economic-political conditions of poor people have an enormous constraining effect on social capital itself and its supposed material benefits for the poor.     

试论新闻舆论监督的社会责任

构建社会主义和谐社会,离不开精神文明建设,而构建积极向上的精神文明,则离不开新闻舆论的正确引导。本文重点论述何为新闻舆论监督及开展新闻舆论监督的必要性．并对新闻舆论监督在和谐社会中的责任做了进一步具体化分析。     

顾客期望管理及其对旅行社员工认同感、胜任感、责任感的影响——以广州为例

本文从员工角度对广州两家大型旅行社的顾客期望管理措施进行调查,通过实证研究的方式深入分析顾客期望管理的构成因素,并在此基础上探讨了顾客期望管理措施对员工的企业认同感、工作胜任感、工作责任感的影响。研究结果表明：顾客期望管理由评估与分析顾客需求、培训和激励员工、给予顾客正确期望等3个因子构成;顾客期望管理措施对员工的企业认同感、工作胜任感、工作责任感有显著的影响。     

Reexamining transport poverty,job access,and gender issues in Central and Eastern Europe

Tirana, the Balkan capital examined in this study, displays patterns of gendered job search behavior and access, which are unique within contemporary Europe and even within post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Here, it is a rather spatially constricted job search range rather than transport poverty that prevents women living in first-ring suburbs from attaining satisfactory employment. Female commutes are extraordinarily short and most often on foot. While the city now has nearly one million inhabitants and a high car ownership rate, and is located in Europe, the employment and mobility choices and behaviors of its female residents resemble those in developing rather than developed countries, and in small rather than large cities. The reasons underpinning this situation have more to do with socio-cultural gender barriers and less with transport poverty or labor market weaknesses. This finding might apply to other Balkan capitals or cities outside Europe, which have recently experienced large waves of internal migration and where both existing residents and newcomers have not yet adjusted to ‘big city’ life.     

Development,Transition and Globalization in China's Coal Industry

The coal industry has proved to be one of the most strategically important but also one of the most problematic industries in China. Closing small township and village owned (TVE) coalmines, declaring loss‐making state‐owned (SOE) mines bankrupt, and building up modern coal corporations are all causing huge difficulties for the government. The main reason for the problems now facing the industry is the fact that TVEs, SOEs and coal corporations were encouraged to meet different needs at different times and now all face different challenges from development, transition and globalization. This article uses research from the three major categories of coal companies in China to demonstrate that, while these three parallel challenges do necessitate reform in the industry, this reform must be handled cautiously, innovatively and in a balanced way.