Title: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Offshore Outsourcing (henceforth outsourcing).

Aim: To study the impact of outsourcing on CSR (understood as social, industrial relations, Occupational, Health and Safety and environmental standards) practices among local companies and vice versa.

Countries: Malaysia, South Africa and Ghana

Project Brief: The business – society interface dates back long in history and keeps developing as businesses and societies change. The present emphasis CSR has in many ways to be perceived as an outcome to the last 20 years shifting focus towards the role and responsibility of the private sector in line with liberalisation, privatisation and public-private partnerships. With globalisation management of CSR issues across company boundaries is gaining importance and under certain conditions CSR norms and standards travel from developed countries to developing countries as part of FDI and outsourcing arrangements. This travel is most often perceived in the literature as a transfer, which includes inherently good features (the improved practices, upgrading of the local company as a ‘necessity’ to compete globally) and win-win-situations.

The uptake of CSR in developing countries needs also to be reflected against the context in the countries studied. Malaysia, South Africa and Ghana each have their particular history and development, which have cast business-society relations in each their way. The Malaysian Bumiputra-policy, the South African (broad based) Black Economic Empowerment policy and the adversarial relations between state and the private sector in Ghana are elements of this. Moreover, changing policies of corporate governance and ethics in developing countries affect the local CSR discourse.

A working hypothesis is that outsourcing by Northern companies with a global corporate or product brand will pursue a proactive outsourcing strategy, which requires the involved local companies to address social, environmental and industrial relations' issues in a collaborative or coercive manner, while Northern companies without global brands will pursue a reactive outsourcing strategy by way of contracting Southern companies without placing CSR demands on local companies. Likewise, contracting companies in the South will apply a proactive strategy of CSR upgrading, if they have a strategy of product or functional upgrading, while they will apply a reactive strategy, if they rely on a cost-competition strategy. Yet, little is known about the CSR strategies and practices of companies in the North and the South due to the recent emergence of the CSR issue and a tendency in the literature to focus on the standards, but not investigate the processes of alignment and the company's interaction.

The project will conduct a number of case studies of Danish and local companies in specific sectors. The choice of sectors/companies are to be decided based on the established or emerging CSR practices, and on a survey of outsourcing Danish companies. First round of field work will take place in Autumn 2006 (Malaysia) and Spring 2007 in Africa.

Participants: Søren Jeppesen (South Africa), John Kuada (Ghana), and Peter Wad (Malaysia).