Implementation of CSR and sustainability in supply chains in China and Brazil
Eskil Kristian Riskær’s research explores how responsibility for the environment and for social justice and development is constructed and negotiated at local sites and in transnational spaces of governance in and around the overlapping and interconnected areas of corporate social responsibility (CSR), business and human rights, and sustainability. The empirical entry point is the implementation of CSR and sustainability in the supply chains of five of the largest MNCs with headquarters in Denmark. The main focus has been on related contractual relations and procurement practices as developed and rolled out in the headquarters, as well as in their subsidiaries and a number of their suppliers in China and Brazil. Eskil has engaged with a wide range of actors and intermediaries in and around related transnational production and governance networks. He has made extensive observations and gathered a range of documents, including confidential procurement contracts, and governance guidelines and official documents, and has made over 80 interviews in the three countries. Eskil has also met with representatives or participated at events of other stakeholders, such as governmental and international bodies, civil-society groups and NGOs.
Eskil will use the brown-bag seminar mainly to present the data he has collected in the field over the last two years, in order to explore:
1. how these data relate to the central theoretical, conceptual, methodological and analytical considerations of his research, and
2. how he will use this in structuring and writing up the argument of his monograph.
In his PhD Eskil is developing and applying a somewhat eclectic, but of course still theoretically informed and empirically grounded framework for working at once critically and constructively with notions of justice, ethics, sustainability and responsibility as these play out in hybrid and “post-political” forms of governance found in transnational networks of production.
The seminar takes place on TUESDAY February 18, 2014 from 11:30-12:30 in room PH18B-S.023
Eric Guthey, ICM, will be the discussant