This paper extends Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) scholarship to focus on issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Despite a significant body of work on gender and CSR from a variety of feminist perspectives, long-standing evidence of sexual harassment and sexual violence in business, particularly in global value chains, and the rise of the #MeToo movement, there has been little scholarship focused specifically on these issues in the context of CSR. Our conceptual paper addresses this gap in the literature through (...) two key contributions. First, we extend the theoretical base of CSR scholarship by drawing upon and explicating radical feminist theory, a resource that has been underutilized in the field to date. This theoretical perspective is well placed to offer insights around the issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and to explain the centrality of these concerns to the gender equality agenda in business and in CSR. Second, building upon insights from radical feminism, and from research on CSR and human rights, we explicate a business and human rights approach to sexual harassment, sexual violence and CSR. We point to ways in which this approach might be more effective in addressing these issues than previously adopted strategies and suggest directions for future research arising from our analysis. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers and social theorists have engaged in an extensive critique of the project of modernity during the past three decades. However, many feminists seem to assume that the critique of religion essential to this project remains valid. Radical criticism of religion in the European tradition presupposes a theory of religion that is highly ethnocentric, and Marx's theory of religion serves as a case in point.

This article examines the production of consecrated femininity in contemporary Polish convents. Drawing on qualitative data from 35 interviews in five religious communities the article explores the type of female agency which transforms the dominant model of Polish femininity instead of resisting it. Following Lois McNay’s concept of narrative identity, the article argues that female agency does not necessarily emerge out of subversion of the male-dominated Polish Catholic Church. Rather than simply being placed within discursive structures, Catholic nuns reflexively alter (...) them by using a mixture of gender ideology and spiritually driven gender work in order to produce coherent and socially meaningful narratives of consecrated femininity. (shrink)