Global Political Economy

Funded by Velux Foundation, the project aims at investigating alternatives to currently dominant forms of economic organization. In the wake of the global financial crisis, change and reform of the financial sector was the name of the game, but it seems that hardly anything has changed. Have we “let a serious crisis go to waste”? The present project takes its point of departure in the nuanced answer to this question that appears when one turns from purely economic explanations to interdisciplinary investigations of the social, political, and communicative causes and consequences of the financial crisis.

Sine Nørholm Just
snj.mpp@cbs.dk

Exacerbated by the Great Recession, youth transitions to employment and adulthood have become increasingly protracted, precarious, and differentiated by gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Youth Labor in Transition examines young people's integration into employment, alongside the decisions and consequences of migrating to find work and later returning home. The authors identify key policy challenges for the future related to NEETS, overeducation, self-employment, and ethnic differences in outcomes. This illustrates the need to encompass a wider understanding of youth employment and job insecurity by including an analysis of economic production and how it relates to social reproduction of labor if policy intervention is to be effective. 

Janine Leschke
jle.egb@cbs.dk

Auditing’s role in the fight against corruption has so far been hesitant. While private sector financial auditing has generally neglected corruption as a potential source of material errors in financial statements, public sector auditing has, at best, accepted responsibility for the prevention of corruption. The aim of the project is to examine the arguments for auditing’s limited role in the fight against corruption and investigate the potential for auditing to play a direct role in the detection of commercial corruption.

Kim Klarskov Jeppesen
kkj.acc@cbs.dk

CBS Department of Business and Politics is hosting a research project on political corruption in developing countries. The project aims at uncovering links between poverty and political corruption in connection with elections in new democracies and to examine the consequences of corruption for redistributive policies. This will be examined through an integrated research design combining a case study – implemented as a post-election survey in South Africa – with a multilevel data analysis using individual-level survey data from a large number of countries. The project is funded by the Danish Research Council.

Mogens Kamp Justesen
mkj.egb@cbs.dk

While digital media tend to be celebrated for fostering innovation, this research project aims to shed light on some of the ‘dark sides’ of digitalization. The project is focused the normalization of ethically problematic organizational practices through their public visibilization via digital media. These considerations are empirically explored by studying online self-reports of mini-bribery in Las Vegas hotel business (see also Schoeneborn & Homberg, 2018). In particular, the study investigates to what extent rhetorical dynamics contribute to the legitimation and institutionalization of ethically problematic business practices.

Dennis Schoeneborn
ds.msc@cbs.dk

This project analyses how and why international anti-corruption activities organized by states, international organizations and NGOs have come to address the responsibility of business in the fight against corruption, and how corporate anti-corruption activity are connected to wider sustainability, corporate responsibility and business ethics agendas. The project strives to bring us more knowledge about how corporate engagement, particularly its softer dimensions beyond legal compliance (if any), is practised by analyzing the relations between business, government organizations and civil society actors.

Hans Krause Hansen
hkh.msc@cbs.dk

The overall aim of this project is to analyze the prospects and limitations of organizational transparency understood as the idea, the objective, and the policy of increased openness and accountability in organizational practices. Focusing on the intersection between processes that promote and advance transparency and the conditions and procedures that impede it, the project explores how organizational responses to demands for transparency from the wider community shape and, eventually, affect public insight into contemporary organizations.

Lars Thøger Christensen
ltc.msc@cbs.dk

This project works from the assumption that the interplay of transparency and opacity is constitutive of organizational practice, contributes to the allocation of agency and influences the configuration of legitimacy. The project looks at how transparency ideals are articulated in the organizational world of policy-making and how opacity figures in the practices of organizations. How do organizations make use of transparency to construct legitimacy and to gain leverage for their interests? How do organizations work to maintain a degree of opacity around core dimensions of organizational resources?

Christina Garsten
cg.msc@cbs.dk

The European Union confronts inequalities across a range of areas from gender, to generational, wealth, mobility and opportunity. One underlying factor common to these expanded inequalities is deficiencies in fiscal systems. The COFFERS project seeks to redress these deficiencies as policy innovation at national, regional and international levels undergoes a period of accelerated development. The consortium tracks the tax gap and regulatory innovation, traces how expert networks, jurisdictions and taxpayers adapt to and negotiate rapid evolutionary change and transmits forward looking risk assessment and policy advice to intervene in that evolutionary process.

Duncan Wigan
dw.ioa@cbs.dk

A key initiative of the UN has been the establishment of the Global Compact Principles. This research project aims to address two themes: 1) What role does United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) play in articulating the linkages between CSR reporting and the envisioned agenda of sustainable development?, And 2) Through an examination of the UN organization’s external reporting, mapping and analyses, how are UN organizations themselves embedding the principles of sustainability reporting into their external reporting? The research seeks to connect selected SDGs and economic sustainability, through the establishment of a framework that ties together, the SDGs, indicators/measurements (input) and integrated reporting by enterprises (output).

Caroline Aggestam-Pontoppidan
cap.acc@cbs.dk