CSR beyond the corporation: contested governance in global value chains

Abstract

AbstractThe frontier of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is constantly being negotiated by corporate and non‐corporate actors that vie to define its meaning and scope. In this article, we explore the relationship between CSR and governance in the context of global value chains that span both organizational boundaries and geographic borders. We draw on the CSR and global value chain literature to highlight the nexus between CSR and what we see as two overlapping dimensions of governance. These are industrial governance (or the coordination of relationships among actors in a global value chain) and global governance (the efforts of non‐state actors to manage transnational processes, including via the creation of norms and rules regarding global production). Drawing inspiration from an emergent neo‐Gramscian perspective on global value chains, we propose the notion of contested governance to explain how CSR becomes a key domain in which these contending, though potentially complementary, ways of defining and delimiting governance as an analytic concept play out.