Organisational geographies of corporate responsibility: a UK-US comparison of retailers' ethical trading initiatives

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sitesof production, has become a key means through which labour inretailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, thereis evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedlyin their approaches to ethical trade and that such variationis shaped, in part, by the national-institutional contexts inwhich retailers are based. This article explores this insightby evaluating the distinct roles played by multi-stakeholderinitiatives for ethical trade in the UK and USA. While the UK'score multi-stakeholder initiative, the Ethical Trading Initiative(ETI), encompasses retailers from a variety of sectors and takesa developmental and continuous learning approach to ethicaltrade, the US multi-stakeholder initiatives are focussed moreon corporate accountability based on compliance monitoring exclusivelyin the clothing sector. Given recent organisational attemptsto foster transnational dialogue between multi-stakeholder initiatives,though, we argue that the precise ways in which national-institutionalcontexts shape retailers’ ethical trading approaches arefluid and mutable. We contribute to the literature on the governanceof global supply chains, retailer power and corporate responsibilityby emphasising the political significance of national-institutionalenvironments. However, in line with notions of relational economicgeography, we understand these national-institutional environmentsas active and dynamic contexts, and accentuate the coalitionalways in which nationally based organisations evolve in theirhome countries and go on to shape broader transnational agendasfor ethical trade.     

IF: COUNTERFACTUAL AND CONDITIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Conditionals are a feature of historiography. Despite this, historiographical research is focused predominantly on one kind of conditional, counterfactuals. New trans‐Atlantic contributions to this research by Catherine Gallagher and Richard J. Evans highlight the rich history of counterfactuals in Western thought, and their use by individuals and groups to imagine a present and a future that addresses regrets about the present. Their intimation of a flattening out of history through counterfactual nostalgia is not supported by the artistic expression of Tacita Dean, and new contributions to the philosophy of conditionals, building relations, and causal relations by Karen Bennett and Anthony Kwame Appiah. This review teases out the layered, causally tainted, and metaphysically agnostic world posited by Karen Bennett and conjoins it with David Lewis's reflections on possible worlds to suggest that conditional and counterfactual operators in historiography are building restrictors. This takes us away from Niall Ferguson's argument for the use of counterfactuals as a recognition of the underdetermination of history, and reminds us of the need to—as Appiah argues so succinctly—understand the pervasive role that idealizations play in helping us to manage the world and ourselves. The review rounds out by highlighting the computational implications of our conditional world, inviting historians to be at the table as fairness is debated and coded. In this way, the gap in research on the ethical need for historiographical conditionals in the twenty‐first century is highlighted.     

Empire and Domestic Space in the Fiction of Jamaica Kincaid

Three novels by Jamaica Kincaid are critically investigated for their representation of colonial and domestic space. Aspiring middle-class Afro-Caribbean families in the patriarchal-colonial society of 1950s and 1960s British Antigua occupied social spaces gendered largely according to western design. In Kincaid’s fiction, the house and yard are designated as feminine and reproductive spaces, while outside the home lies the public world of employment, administration, formal education and migration opportunity, all of which are governed by the norms and expectations of a white Eurocentric culture. Kincaid’s female characters display strategies of subversion and resistance which disrupt the homogeneity of territorial and cultural colonisation.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

One way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures.     

Soldiers of Misfortune: the Angolan Civil War,The British Mercenary Intervention,and UK Policy towards Southern Africa, 1975–6

This article examines the controversial involvement of British mercenaries in the early phases of the Angolan civil war (1975–6), and analyses the effect of their intervention on UK domestic politics and foreign affairs. It concludes that the mercenaries involved - who fought with the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) in January 1976 - were recruited largely as a result of private initiative, and that the available evidence suggests that the British government was not officially complicit in their enlistment. This article also shows that the mercenary intervention not only sharpened party-political differences between the Conservative and Labour parties over East–West relations, but also contributed to domestic fears of right-wing paramilitary activity within Britain itself.