The expropriation of marginalized women’s labor is a key issue in business ethics in these times of global outsourcing and informal work arrangements. This has led to a transnational advocacy movement for securing the labor rights of homeworkers, who are poor women working on piece-rate contracts out of their homes. Drawing on materialist feminism, our paper critically explores the homeworker network in Pakistan, that was set up as part of a global push by international institutions and networks to localize the (...) issue across geographies. Our focus is the national women’s NGO that leads advocacy efforts on the issue in the country and its relationship with other actors. Through fieldwork spanning 3 years we find that the network employs a top-down ‘us versus them’ approach in advocacy and mobilization. The race-to-the-bottom between the network’s national and district-level actors for donor funding further undermines prospects for developing indigenous narratives of resistance. The network, while mission bound to enhance the collective agency of its constituency, has depoliticized what should have been a class-based feminist struggle. From a materialist perspective, we conclude that the NGOized network rests upon and feeds off of its constituency, creating an additional layer of primitive accumulation over the workers it represents. (shrink)

We leverage insights and theories from the extensive inter-firm alliance literature to explore the effect of the sector of the partners on Firm–NGO alliance governance. Our analysis suggests that the sector of the partners has an important impact on alliance governance, not only because it constrains the availability of some governance mechanisms but also because it makes alternative mechanisms available or relevant to the partners. Specifically, we predict that B2N alliances will rely on contracts, a restricted scope, and non-equity hostages, (...) such as reputational hostages and stakeholder involvement, rather than equity, leading to limited protection against opportunism. As a consequence, B2N alliance partners will need to rely on trust-based governance mechanisms to a greater extent than B2B alliance partners, although trust will be harder to build in B2N alliances. (shrink)

Concern for NGO accountability has been intensified in recent years, following the growth in the size of NGOs and their power to influence global politics and curb the excesses of globalization. Questions have been raised about where the sector embraces the same standards of accountability that it demands from government and business. The objective of this paper is to examine one aspect of NGO accountability, its discharge through annual reporting. Using Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and specifically its validity claims, (...) the research investigates whether NGOs use their annual reporting process to account to the host societies in which they operate or steer stakeholder actions toward their own self-interests. The results of the study indicate that efforts by organizations to account are characterized by communicative action through the provision of truthful disclosures, generally appropriate to the discharge of accountability and in a manner intended to improve their understandability. At the same time, however, some organizations exhibit strategically oriented behaviors in which the disclosure content is guided by the opportunity to present organizations in a particular light and there appears a lack of rhetor authenticity. The latter findings cast doubt on the ethical inspiration of NGOs and the values they demand from business communities, and questions arise as to why such practices exist and what lessons can be learnt from them. (shrink)

Relations between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and companies have been the subject of a sharply increasing amount of publications in recent years within academic business journals. In this article, we critically assess this fast-developing body of literature, which we treat as forming a ‘business and society discourse’ on NGO–business relations. Drawing on discourse theory, we examine 199 academic articles in 11 business and society, international business, and management journals. Focusing on the dominant articulations on the NGO–business relationship and key signifiers they (...) rely on, we analyze the problem-settings of articles in order to reveal the statements that are acceptable and appropriate within this field. Our threefold aim is to (1) identify dominant articulations of NGO–business relations in business and society discourse, (2) expose those articulations that are silenced or suppressed by these dominant articulations, and (3) critically assess possible power effects of these discursive dynamics in the field of discursivity. While business and society discourse on NGO–business relations overall remains open to many different articulations, we also find that those articulations that focus on NGO–business partnerships and governance initiatives tend to privilege collaborative and deliberative ways of engaging and marginalize more adversarial subject positions. We call for more recognition of the potentially constructive role that can be played by conflict. (shrink)

China has long enjoyed its position as the world's cheapest production country. However, this position is being shaken due to the increasingly rising costs in China in pace with China's rapid economic development. China's New Labour Contract Law which took effect from 1 January 2008 has further pushed the labour costs in China in general. The purpose of this article is to arrive at an in-depth understanding of why foreign firms conduct sourcing in China where sourcing is becoming increasingly expensive. (...) The experiences of four Swedish companies in the textile and clothing industry (TCI) conducting sourcing in China are presented. Our findings show that sourcing in China is becoming both cost-and strategy-driven. Companies purely chasing the cheapest production would most probably consider leaving China, whereas companies with a long-term strategic intent and a high level of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices will retain all or most of their sourcing activities on the Chinese soil despite the rising costs. (shrink)

In the United States, the IRS now requires charities to publicly disclose any significant asset diversion, which is the theft or unauthorized use of assets, that the charity identifies during the year. We use this new disclosure to investigate whether strong governance reduces the likelihood of a charitable asset diversion. Specifically, for a sample of 1528 charities from 2008 to 2012, we simultaneously examine eleven measures of governance that capture four broad governance constructs: board monitoring, independence of key individuals, tone (...) at the top, and capital provider oversight. We find consistent evidence that good governance across all four constructs is negatively associated with the probability of an asset diversion. Of the eleven governance measures, our results indicate that monitoring by debt holders and government grantors, audits, and keeping managerial duties in-house are most strongly associated with lower incidence of fraud. Our results also indicate that the likelihood of a fraud is negatively associated with a board review of the Form 990, the existence of a conflict of interest policy, and the presence of restricted donations. In addition, we document that the likelihood of an asset diversion is negatively associated with program efficiency and positively associated with growth and organizational complexity. (shrink)