Conference and Special Issue on Corporate Social Responsibility and Labour Standards: Bridging Private Governance, Industrial Relations and Management Perspectives
| Author | Gregory Jackson,Virginia Doellgast,Lucio Baccaro |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12088 |
Call for Papers
Conference and Special Issue on
Corporate Social Responsibility and
Labour Standards: Bridging Private
Governance, Industrial Relations and
Management Perspectives
1. Aims and scope
The conference and special issue of British Journal of Industrial Relations is
dedicated to the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and labour
standards. CSR is treated as an emerging new regulatory regime for address-
ing labour and other standards, which interacts in complex fashion with state
and international regulations and with traditional industrial relations prac-
tices. The goal is to reach a deeper and dispassionate understanding of why
CSR policies emerge, how they function and what kind of concrete results
they achieve, as well as of the newly emerging policy mix in the field of labour
standards. We aim to encourage dialogue between various research streams
around these issues, including the management and international business
scholarship on CSR, the sociology and political science literatures on private
governance across global supply chains and development of multilevel regu-
latory regimes in the field of labour regulation, and scholarship grounded in
the traditions of labour and industrial relations.
CSR has become a growing field of corporate activities and policy devel-
opment over the last decade. Labour standards figure very prominently in
these debates, prompted by scandals surrounding child labour, poor worker
health and safety, and the continued problems of low wages and inequality
within global value chains. In this literature, CSR is often defined in terms of
voluntary business activities aimed at promoting improvement of social and
environmental standards. A large part of CSR research by management
scholars has focused on the ‘business case’ and investigated whether CSR
adoption also translates into benefits for firms. These include improved
relations with stakeholders such as employees and consumers, stronger cor-
porate reputation, and ultimately better financial performance. Despite this
focus on stakeholders, management typically faces dilemmas between busi-
ness objectives and societal or environmental outcomes.
Management research on CSR has given insufficient attention to the ten-
sions related to the plurality of actors who negotiate and implement CSR
bs_bs_banner
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12088
52:3 September 2014 0007–1080 pp. 622–625
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
To continue reading
Request your trial