Upstream Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

The debate about the appropriate standards for upstream corporate social responsibility (CSR) of multinational corporations (MNCs) has been on the public and academic agenda for some three decades. The debate originally focused narrowly on “contract responsibility” of MNCs for monitoring of upstream contractors for “sweatshop” working conditions violating employee rights. The authors argue that the MNC upstream responsibility debate has shifted qualitatively over time to “full producer responsibility” involving an expansion from “contract responsibility” in three distinct dimensions. First, there is an expansion of scope from working conditions to human rights and social and environmental impacts broadly defined. Second, there is expansion in depth of this broader responsibility to the whole upstream supply chain without regard to contracting status. Upstream responsibility now includes all suppliers, including direct contractors and the chain of suppliers to such contractors. Finally, the change in CSR scope and depth has led to an evolution of CSR management practice.

Keywords

sweatshops human rights corporate social responsibility sphere of influence

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are embedded in highly complex and often globally organized value chains (Gereffi & Fernandez-Stark, 2011). Value chain here is understood vertically—from material sourcing to production and final sale of the product to the customer. Downstream, businesses are connected with their customers and the social contexts, in which consumers and consumption acts are embedded. Upstream, they are connected with their suppliers and the social contexts surrounding the various steps of production. Following the terminology of Phillips and Caldwell (2005), there is a corresponding distinction between downstream and upstream corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Downstream CSR examines a firm’s responsibility toward mainly consumers. Classic downstream CSR examples are product safety and liability cases such as the flaws in the gas tank design of the Ford Pinto in the 1970s (Gioia, 1992). Other downstream CSR examples include smoking (Palazzo & Richter, 2005) and obesity (Schrempf, 2012). The key issue in downstream CSR is the impact of direct negative effects of product consumption (e.g., health consequences) on customers, but it increasingly includes indirect negative effects that consumption has on society in general (e.g., waste disposal or health and insurance costs provoked by obesity or smoking).

In upstream CSR, the focus lies on the side effects that potentially occur in the production of goods and services. These side effects affect corporate suppliers and their employees as well as the local communities in which production activities are embedded. The authors focus on this side of the CSR debate. While recently consumption has also attracted an increasing scholarly interest (Smith, Palazzo, & Bhatthacharya, 2010), upstreaming CSR issues have been the focus of the public debate on the responsibility of corporations with regard to social and environmental challenges. This manifests in a rising tide of campaigns that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) launch against corporations since the late 1980s (Petersen, 1992; Sethi, 2003). NGO activism has been discussed as the key driver of CSR engagement of corporations connected to globally stretched production networks (Sethi, 2003; Zadek, 2004). As the upstream CSR debate is mainly driven by NGO activism, an analysis of how NGO activism has evolved over the last decades can provide relevant insights into CSR theory and practice.

Hence, the authors review how the practical discourse on upstream CSR has evolved by analyzing the criticism and campaigns of NGOs over the last three decades. This review covers nine industries and shows which CSR demands were imposed on MNCs and how those demands developed. This historic review reveals an evolution of the upstream CSR debate from a narrow focus on violations of worker rights in contractors’ factories to a broader concern with violations of human rights and also social and environmental impacts along the complete corporate supply chain upstream of an MNC. A closer analysis of this historic evolution shows a qualitative difference between the traditional discussion and the current discussion on upstream CSR. The MNC upstream responsibility debate has shifted over time to “full producer responsibility” involving an expansion from “contract responsibility” in three distinct dimensions. First, there is an expansion of scope from working conditions to human rights and social and environmental impacts broadly defined. Second, there is an expansion in depth of this broader responsibility to the whole upstream supply chain without regard to contracting status. Upstream responsibility thus now includes all suppliers, including direct contractors and also the chain of suppliers to such contractors. Finally, the change of CSR scope and depth has led to an evolvement of CSR management practice, which has evolved toward a proactive approach characterized by an increased political responsibility of corporations and increased cooperation among corporations and between corporations and other stakeholders.

The authors complement the practical analysis of the upstream CSR discourse with a review of the parallel evolution of the respective scientific discourse in three leading business ethics journals (Business & Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, and Journal of Business Ethics). Studying this historic evolution of upstream CSR in NGO demands and academic theorizing, the authors wish to contribute to the existing business ethics literature by reviewing NGO activism and academic scholarship, and by conceptualizing how the understanding of upstream CSR has evolved from a narrow focus on worker rights to full producer responsibility.

Scholars (Freeman, 2004; Waddock, 2004) criticize the separation of theory and practice. Freeman (2004) refers to the separation as “an incredible gap” (p. 128) and Waddock (2004) as “parallel universes” (p. 5). Both Freeman and Waddock call for bridging theory and practice. Rorty (1999) argues that focusing on one side provides an incomplete picture. The authors’ NGO and academic analyses address these concerns and provide a combined overview of how practice and theory on upstream CSR evolved. The main root of CSR practice is NGO activism, not new insights into theory. Therefore, it is relevant to look at the practical CSR debate (its beginning as well as development) to better understand how the scholarly debate has evolved over the last three decades. Reviewing the practical CSR debates helps scholars today to understand past theoretical work and might also hint to where the CSR literature is heading. Comparing the practical debate with the academic debate then allows for an analysis of the relationship between the two. The results reveal that the debates in practice and theory are not that separate. Actually, the authors observe a coevolvement of the practical and theoretical debates.

The rest of the article is structured into three main sections. First, the authors present the findings of the review of major NGO activities. Second, the authors present the impact of the development of NGO activism on the CSR scope, CSR depth, and management practice. Third, the authors elaborate on the findings of the review on academic scholarship on upstream CSR. Finally, directions for future research are provided before a conclusion is drawn

Upstream CSR: The Evolution of NGO Campaigning Against MNCs

The review of major NGO activities during the last few decades included academic articles on major NGO activities, NGO activities in the media, NGO publications (reports and campaigns), and NGO websites. This review covered nine industries (banana, chocolate, coffee, diamond, garment, information technology, oil, sportswear, and toy). The appendix provides a selective overview of the upstream CSR debate in those industries, including the milestone campaigns that increased public awareness. The appendix does not list all the numerous NGO activities, campaigns, and initiatives. It outlines the development of upstream CSR issues by highlighting the most prevalent NGO activities in different industries as perceived by the NGO community itself (Berne Declaration, 2010; Sluiter, 2009).

Historically, the upstream CSR debate started as a critical analysis by activist NGOs of the production outsourcing of MNCs (Appelbaum & Dreier, 1999; Held, McGrath, Goldblatt, & Perraton, 1999). Since the 1970s, various industries have shifted production to selected developing and emerging countries (Green, 1998; Harney, 2009). In their bids to attract foreign investment, local governments were sometimes reluctant or too weak to regulate and enforce worker rights (Roach, 2005). The factory owners were struggling to keep the production costs low (Green, 1998). The result was that various goods were (and still are) produced in factories where employees, often women or even children, work overtime for long hours, sometimes for below local minimum wage and under low health-and-safety standards (Bigelow, 1997; Connor, 2002).

Media coverage of questionable working conditions in developing countries and criticism of so-called sweatshops started as early as the 1980s (Petersen, 1992; Sethi, 2003). However, it was not until the 1990s that NGOs approached MNCs to take responsibility for the working conditions at their suppliers’ factories (McLaughlin, 1993; Morris, 1995). NGOs started to extend corporate boundaries of responsibility to include direct suppliers although those corporations were not legally liable for the behavior of their business partners (DeWinter, 2001). In general, the NGO approach was initially characterized by three elements: contract reasoning, stepwise campaigning, and logic of opposition.

NGOs relied on contract-based reasoning to argue that MNCs’ responsibility extended toward their direct suppliers. Hence, NGOs focused on sweatshop conditions at MNCs’ direct suppliers. The contract reasoning helped establish direct links between MNCs and the working conditions in their direct suppliers’ factories (DeWinter, 2001). NGOs argued that MNCs could ensure decent working conditions the same way they ensured quality standards and delivery times through contracts with their suppliers. In this sense, sweatshop conditions would be a violation of the contract (Global Exchange, 2007). Student groups also used and still use the sponsoring contracts between sports brands and their universities to raise awareness (Appelbaum & Dreier, 1999; Phillips, 2010). The contract was perceived as the best means to solve the social problems in the supply chain. This contract-based reasoning signaled a liability understanding of responsibility that assumes a direct or causal relation between the harm and the actor (Honoré, 1999; Young, 2006). Given the NGOs’ focus on contracts between MNCs and their suppliers, the authors refer to this initial upstream CSR debate as contract upstream CSR or “contract responsibility.”

Second, NGOs followed a stepwise approach when targeting corporations. They first focused on strong industry leaders before moving on to other companies or the industry in general. Global Exchange or United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), in their respective campaigns, focused first on the industry leader Gap in the garment industry, Nike in the sportswear industry, and Starbucks in the coffee industry (Global Exchange, 2008). Once the targeted companies started improving, NGOs pressured other companies in the same industry to follow suit. If the companies failed to make credible efforts in fixing their supply chain problems, NGOs kept their pressure on the targeted adversaries (Connor, 2002). In their stepwise approach, leading brands were used as a leverage to impose new standards on the industry.

The authors’ review of NGO campaigns in nine industries revealed that after the garment and sportswear industries, NGOs gradually targeted other industries (Global Exchange, 2008; Sluiter, 2009). Table 1 summarizes how the focus of attention shifted, with time, from one sector to the other.

Table 1.

Contract Upstream CSR: Industry Highlights.

Year	Industry	Occasion
1993	Garment	The Gap Campaign (the National Labor Committee)
1996	Sportswear	Nike Campaign (Global Exchange)
1998	Banana	Joint global NGO campaign against Chiquita
1999	Toys	Toy campaign (the National Labor Committee)
2000	Coffee	Starbucks campaign (Global Exchange)
2002	Chocolate	Fair Trade Chocolate Campaign (Global Witness)
2004	ICT	Launch of “Clean up your computer” campaign (CAFOD)

Note. CSR = corporate social responsibility; NGO = nongovernmental organization; ICT = International Childcare Trust; CAFOD = Catholic Agency for Overseas Development.

Even though the first reports about bad working conditions on agricultural farms were published earlier (see Riisgaard, 2004), the awareness of worker rights violations in the banana industry gained momentum only after the Joint Global Chiquita campaign in 1998 (Riisgaard, 2004). After targeting the garment industry, the National Labor Committee (NLC, 2001) investigated worker rights violations in Chinese toy factories. When the NLC (2001) launched its Toy campaign, the public awareness of bad conditions in this industry increased considerably (Vêtements Propres, 2002). Other NGOs such as the Clean Clothes Campaign followed and included the toy industry in their campaigns (Sluiter, 2009). Agricultural products also have gained increased attention of NGOs. As the labor-intensive part of the supply chain happened to be on plantations and farms, NGOs progressively worked their way up to the sourcing stage. Worker rights violations found on coffee and cocoa farms were similar to those found in suppliers’ factories (Global Exchange, 2003; Human Rights Watch, 2002). However, according to the Swiss NGO Berne Declaration (2010), no debate about bad working conditions in the chocolate industry came up until 2001. An important milestone in this industry was the launching of Global Exchange’s (2003) Chocolate Fair Trade Campaign. Finally, the Information Technology (IT) industry was among the last industries being targeted by NGOs for sweatshop conditions. The first coordinated NGO campaign against Dell, Hewlett–Packard (HP), and IBM by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development in 2004 was a milestone in the contract upstream CSR debate in that industry (Astill & Griffith, 2004).

Finally, the way NGOs and activists approached corporations through the 1990s can be best described as “naming and shaming” following a logic of opposition (NLC, 2001). NGOs published reports and triggered media broadcasts, often with dramatic photos, pushing the target corporations directly into the spotlight (Noros & Emery, 1999). In general, they approached corporations in a rather aggressive and demanding way with boycotts, anticorporate campaigns (Beder, 2002; Sage, 1999), and anticompany photographs (Sluiter, 2009). For instance, activists attacked Starbucks shops in Seattle in 1999 (Alden, 2000) and Global Exchange threatened Starbucks with a campaign during the company’s shareholder meeting (Garcia-Johnson, 2003; R. T. Nelson, 2000). During the 1990s, NGOs and activists considered corporations to be “bad” (Le Menestrel, van den Hove, & de Bettignies, 2002) and identified them as being part of the problem (Astill & Griffith, 2004; Bjurling, 2004). C&A was derisively called “Cheap&Awful” by the Dutch NGO community (Sluiter, 2009).

While the focus of contract upstream CSR has been the potentially exploitative relation between MNCs and their contractors, NGOs have moved beyond contract reasoning. Today, some NGOs demand a “full supply chain approach up to the extractive phase” (Steinweg & de Haan, 2007, p. 5). Upstream CSR now includes the complete production process from resource extraction to product assembly. Following the terminology of NGOs (Steinweg & de Haan, 2007), the present upstream CSR debate is referred to as full producer upstream CSR.

The authors’ NGO review revealed two key differences in regard to the NGO approach in contract upstream CSR and full producer upstream CSR: social connection reasoning and the logic of cooperation. Departing from contract reasoning (Global Exchange, 2007), NGOs today increasingly use a social connection logic to link MNCs to societal and environmental side effects along their supply chains such as the relocation of indigenous communities (Robin Wood, 2006). According to a social connection logic, responsibility is derived “from belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition” (Young, 2006, p. 119). For instance, the Burma Campaign connects any corporation operating in Burma to the occurring human rights violations in that country (Richardson, 2009).

Second, the “naming and shaming” approach toward corporations and logic of opposition as applied in contract upstream CSR appear less in current NGO campaigns. NGOs still use anticorporate campaigns such as Greenpeace’s Kit Kat Campaign (Greenpeace International, 2010), but the cooperation between NGOs and MNCs has become an additional option for action. The authors observe increasingly common self-regulatory activities such as multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in which numerous corporations and NGOs together define standards and develop mechanisms of implementation and control. Therefore, campaigns are often a means to pressure corporations into collaboration: Nestlé joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil after the Greenpeace campaign. NGOs seem to increasingly consider MNCs as part of the solution: NGOs and MNCs engage more and more in dialogues, stakeholder meetings, and roundtables (for an overview of MSIs, see Mena & Palazzo, 2012).

This shift from contract responsibility to full producer responsibility also affects the scope of CSR issues, the depth of CSR issues, and related management practice.

Beyond the Contract: The Extended Scope and Depth of Responsibility Claims

Based on their review of NGO practice, the authors argue that there are three qualitative differences between upstream contract CSR and upstream full producer CSR regarding the scope of CSR, the depth of CSR, and CSR management practices.

CSR Scope

The review of NGO practice revealed that the upstream CSR scope has shifted from a focus on worker rights to human rights in general. Ethical issues, such as environmental responsibility (Guerrette, 1986) and bribery (Lane & Simpson, 1984), were discussed in the 1990s and before. However, the contract upstream CSR debate with a focus on worker rights violations at corporate contractors dominated the CSR debate (see Armbruster-Sandoval, 1999; Laabs, 1995, Sethi, 2003). The awareness of sweatshop conditions (i.e., bad working conditions such as compensation below minimum wages, and child labor) in the garment industry rose among students at Duke University in the mid-1990s (Appelbaum & Dreier, 1999; Greenhouse, 1996). The students’ antisweatshop movement began expanding to many other American universities (Greenhouse, 1999), which eventually led to the creation of USAS, the Worker Rights Consortium, and the Fair Labor Association (FLA; USAS, 2008). The main worker rights violations included child labor, low health-and-safety standards, and the suppression of worker unions (Connor, 2002; Green, 1998).

Looking at the current upstream CSR debate about full producer responsibility, the authors observe that CSR issues have considerably broadened. Following an earlier and similar debate within the diamond industry (Global Witness, 1998), today cell phone (Global Witness, 2009), computer (Steinweg & de Haan, 2007), and car manufacturers (Steinweg, 2010) are alleged to be financing civil war and armed conflicts through their material sourcing in conflict zones (Steinweg, 2010). NGOs claim that MNCs are complicit in such human rights violations. Most probably, the first case to gain publicity in terms of corporate complicity in human rights violations was the Shell–Ogoni crisis in the 1990s (Human Rights Watch, 1995). The Ogoni people in Nigeria were fighting for greater control over the natural resources on their lands, which led to violent conflicts between their community and national armed security forces (Amnesty International, 2005). As Shell was operating in the Nigerian region at that time, it soon found itself confronted with demands to investigate its involvement in and contributions to the human rights violations (Amnesty International, 2005).

The critique of Shell’s complicity in the armed conflict between indigenous groups and military groups appeared around the same time as the contract upstream CSR debate. The authors argue that those two debates cannot be summarized under the same CSR umbrella, because their demands and logic are different. In contract upstream CSR, the focus was on worker rights violations to which MNCs were directly linked through their outsourcing contracts with suppliers where such violations occurred (Kernaghan, 1998) and followed a principal–agent logic. In those sweatshop cases, the term complicity was not used. In contrast, the Shell case focused on human rights violations in which Shell was indirectly involved as an accomplice (Clapham & Jerbi, 2001). In that case, the human rights abuse was undertaken by state agencies, not economic business partners.

This terminology of complicity is an important qualitative difference between contract and full producer upstream CSR. In contrast to contract upstream CSR, MNCs are accused of complicity in human rights violations perpetrated by state actors with whom MNCs are linked (Tofalo, 2006). The lawsuit in the Shell–Ogoni case that began in 1996 and ended with a settlement in 2009 served as a catalyst in setting off similar demands in other industries. By the end of the 1990s, Global Witness (1998) verified the involvement of diamond companies in financing civil war in Angola. Today, computer, cell phone, and car manufacturers are confronted with similar claims (Steinweg, 2010; Steinweg & de Haan, 2007). Agricultural products, such as cocoa and bananas, are also often sourced in countries with unstable or oppressive regimes. In 2007, Global Witness (2007) issued a report scrutinizing how chocolate companies financed armed conflicts along the Ivory Coast. Recently, the timber corporation Dalhoff, Larsen, and Horneman was accused for having financed the war in Liberia through its operations in that country (Global Witness, Sherpa, Greenpeace, & Les Amis de la Terre, 2009).

The growing importance of overall human rights violations can be seen in the increased lawsuits against corporations under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA; Jackson, 2009). The ATCA enables citizens of any nationality to sue an entity for a tort committed outside of the United States (Jackson, 2009). As observed by Jackson (2009), ATCA cases increasingly deal with corporate involvement in human rights violations. Even though, a considerable amount of those lawsuits were dismissed, the fact that corporations are increasingly sued under ATCA evidences the trend of broadening upstream CSR demands to include human rights violations.

CSR Depth

The shift from contract reasoning to social connection has an effect on the depth of CSR issues. While NGOs focused on CSR issues at MNCs’ direct contractors at the beginning of the upstream CSR debate, NGO demands, today, go far beyond issues at contractors’ facilities. In reviewing the 1990s’ sweatshop debate, it appears that NGOs focused mainly on CSR issues at direct supplier factories of MNCs where their products were assembled (Kernaghan, 1998; Sethi, 2003). In some cases, factory workers could provide NGOs with the brand name stitched on a shirt, shoe, toy, or laptop (Astill & Griffith, 2004; Kernaghan, 1996; NLC, 2001). For Global Exchange (2007), MNCs are responsible for CSR issues at their direct suppliers’ factories because they are the more powerful entity in the contract relationship and can dictate the terms of the contract.

Today, NGOs address CSR issues deeper in the supply chain: 10 years after NLC urged Kathie Lee Gifford to stop child labor in her clothing line factories (Kernaghan, 1996), the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) exposed the bad working conditions on cotton farms in Uzbekistan. The EJF demanded that H&M and other clothing retailers “engage with civil society groups and international organizations in joint efforts to improve working conditions on cotton farms and remuneration provided to farmers and other workers” (EJF, 2005, p. 42). Even though the poor working conditions on farms have been under criticism in contract upstream CSR (i.e., coffee, banana, and cocoa farms), the EJF’s critique was novel in the sense that it mandated the targeted industries to go deeper into their supply chains and manage worker rights violations up to the first step of their production process (EJF, 2005). In contrast to the initial contract upstream CSR debate, MNCs do not have any direct contractual agreement with those actors further up their value chain, where the harm actually occurs.

The trend of expanding CSR demands along the complete supply chain can also be observed in other industries, such as in the IT industry. NGOs refer to extractive industries as “the forgotten link in the supply chain management of electronic consumer products” (Steinweg & de Haan, 2007, p. 5). SwedWatch raised awareness of the low health-and-safety standards and low wages for workers and contractors of the extractive industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, and demanded that electronics companies take action (Nordbrand & Bolme, 2007). The NGO urged consumer electronics companies, including cell phone producers, to include the extractive industry in their supply chain management and monitoring system to mitigate the sweatshop conditions prevailing at the sourcing level. Recently, NGOs stretched the chain of social connectedness even further. Instead of approaching cell phone producers regarding CSR issues in the extractive industry, they prevailed on cell network operators, like T-Mobile in Germany, to improve their supply chain management (van Huijstee, de Haan, Poyhonen, Heydenreich, & Riddselius, 2009). In none of the aforementioned cases does a contract exist between the MNC and the mining companies.

The CSR depth expanded in other sectors as well. Even though the CSR debate in the agricultural sector pertains to CSR issues at the sourcing level, there is an apparent expansion of CSR demands in this sector, too. For example, Oxfam Germany went beyond the MNCs such as Chiquita that had already been criticized for poor working conditions on their plantations (Human Rights Watch, 2002). It published the results of its analysis of human rights violations in the production of pineapples and bananas, and argued that Germany’s biggest retailers and discounters have a responsibility (Wiggerthale, 2008). These retailers and discounters, however, do often not have contracts with fruit plantations. A similar expansion can be found in the coffee industry. While U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) and Global Exchange focused mainly on coffee roasters like Starbucks, Nestlé, and Procter & Gamble during the 1990s, Oxfam America urged supermarkets and coffee bars to demand that their suppliers pay fair wages to coffee farmers and participate in fair trade programs (Gresser & Tickell, 2002).

Hence, one of the key impacts of the shift in NGO practice from contract to full producer responsibility is an expanded CSR depth: CSR demands expand along the supply chain—addressing issues further up in the supply chain (cotton, conflict minerals) and actors further down the supply chain (cell phone operators, supermarkets).

Management Practice

The shift from NGOs’ logic of opposition to logic of cooperation as well as their shift from contract reasoning to social connection reasoning had an impact on CSR management practice. In particular, CSR management has moved from being reactive to proactive, from a compliance-oriented responsibility to political responsibility, and from a company focus to cooperation.

In the 1990s, corporate reaction to NGO criticism was mainly defensive, compliance oriented, and reactive (Zadek, 2004). Corporations were reluctant to release information on their supply chain relations and their CSR approach. Nike, one of the main targets of NGO attacks during the 1990s, kept silent for a long time (Zadek, 2004). MNCs used the independence of their suppliers as a legal firewall, claiming that they could not be held responsible for the behavior of their legally independent suppliers (Kahle, Boush, & Phelps, 2000). This attitude signaled an understanding of responsibility building on strict liability (Ruggie, 2007), according to which actors are responsible only for the harm they directly cause through their own action (Honoré, 1999).

After persistent antisweatshop campaigning, corporations realized that the antisweatshop movement exposed them to financial risks (Sethi, 2003). Some of them started responding with compliance and monitoring (Sluiter, 2009). The key compliance tool, introduced by various MNCs during the 1990s, was a code of conduct that was used to control suppliers’ social and ethical performance (Graafland, 2002; Winstanley, Clark, & Leeson, 2002). Various MNCs, such as Reebok, Wal-Mart, Disney, and Nike established codes of conduct (see Harney, 2009) and included code compliance as a requirement in their supplier contracts. In 1998, Nike announced the introduction of new policies regarding working conditions at the sites of its suppliers (Connor, 2001). These included, for instance, increasing the minimum age of workers to 18 in footwear factories, and to 16 in apparel factories (Connor, 2001). The 1990s saw a mushrooming of individual company codes, but only very few industry-wide initiatives (Hussain-Khaliq, 2004; Zadek, 2004).

When NGOs continued their pressure on MNCs and even expanded the CSR scope and depth as previously discussed, some corporations have slowly started to acknowledge full producer upstream CSR, as is indicated by several developments. First, some corporations started to approach CSR issues proactively. For instance, even before the first NGO campaigns emerged in the IT sector, HP established its supplier code of conduct in 2002 (HP, 2003). Further, in 2008, HP published a list of most of its direct suppliers without having been pressured to do so (HP, 2008). Second, some corporations have started to become more transparent as the publication of HP’s suppliers list indicates. A few companies are relatively more transparent regarding their supply chain management (van Huijstee et al., 2009), a transparency that would have been rather unthinkable in the mid-1990s when sweatshop demands first emerged (see Zadek, 2004). Third, MNCs tend to engage in more cooperation both within and across industries and with civil society groups. In 2004, several IT companies established the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC—today Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition), which defines worker rights standards at suppliers in the industry (EICC, 2005). Other examples of joint corporate initiatives are the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative. In addition, some corporations have started to cooperate with NGOs. General Motors’ subsidiary in Colombia, for example, cooperated with a local NGO to train “former members of paramilitary groups as a way to reintegrate them into society” (Oetzel, Westermann-Behaylo, Koerber, Fort, & Rivera, 2010, p. 356). Yet, another example of an MNC–NGO partnership is HP’s cooperation with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (Chan, 2009). Since 2007, they have been training employees at one of HP’s Chinese suppliers about labor rights (Chan, 2009). Only recently, Coca Cola agreed to support the ColaLife initiative to transport important social and medical products through its corporate distribution network in developing countries (Berry, 2009). These examples indicate that corporations increasingly react to an NGO’s logic of cooperation by starting discourses and engaging in dialogues with civil society actors and by participating in MSIs. Those MSIs increasingly move from compliance to empowerment logic: the Fair Labor Association fosters capacity building at the supplier level to implement mechanisms for sustainable labor rights compliance (FLA, 2008). Similar trends toward an empowerment approach can be seen in the Fair Wear Foundation or the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative.

In sum, reviewing NGO practice during the last 30 years indicates related changes in CSR scope, CSR depth, and management practice. However, as Walsh (2005) concluded in his analysis, this broader and deeper engagement of corporations is difficult to understand and categorize against the background of existing concepts of CSR. This observation makes the need for a review of the academic perception of the practical CSR discourse between NGOs and MNCs prevalent. The authors argue that the understanding of corporate responsibility in the context of globally stretched production networks that manifest in the earlier analyzed history of civil society engagement is also reflected in the recent debate on the politicization of the firm (Kobrin, 2009; Matten & Crane, 2005; Ruggie, 2011; Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2011).

Upstream CSR: The Evolution of the Academic Perception

The authors paralleled analysis of the NGO campaigning against MNCs with an analysis of the scholarly discourse on upstream CSR in three influential journals that specialize in social issues in management: Business & Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, and Journal of Business Ethics. Since the upstream CSR debate commenced in the 1980s, the review was limited to articles published between 1980 and 2010.

Based on the NGO activities’ review, the authors, independently of each other, prepared a list of keywords that would be used to search the three journals systematically. The authors then consolidated their lists and discussed any discrepancies, deciding on the following keywords: child labor, citizenship, code of ethics, complicity, corporate citizenship, human rights, labor laws, outsourcing, political activity, supply chain, sweatshop, and wage.

The authors used the search engines on the database Business Source Complete and on the websites of the journals to search for each of those keywords mentioned above under subject terms, and saved the articles that contained any of the keywords in an Excel sheet. Some of the articles, which contained two or more of the selected keywords, appeared repetitively under the respective keywords. Any duplicates were deleted. This procedure left more than 700 articles for review. The search for “code of ethics” alone revealed almost 500 articles, most focused on employee codes of ethics and organizational behavior. The literature review focused on upstream-related CSR issues only. Hence, each of the authors reviewed the articles carefully (and independently of each other) to determine whether they fit the criteria (upstream CSR and keywords). The authors discussed their screening results and jointly agreed on the exclusion of articles that did not meet the criteria. As a result, 150 articles (20 in Business & Society, 39 in Business Ethics Quarterly, and 91 in Journal of Business Ethics) were selected.

The 150 articles were categorized into the two phases of upstream CSR that the authors developed from the NGO discourse: contract upstream CSR and full producer upstream CSR. The articles were carefully read, and then assigned independently to one of the two upstream CSR streams by each author. Studies that dealt primarily with worker rights violations at direct suppliers were categorized as contract upstream CSR. Articles that dealt with the broader human rights issues along the complete corporate supply chains were categorized under full producer upstream CSR. The authors compared their findings with each other, and agreed on a final list of classification. In total, 74 and 69 articles were categorized under contract CSR and full producer CSR, respectively. Seven articles were assigned to both categories as they discussed worker and human rights in such a way that it was impossible for the authors to decide on any single categorization assignment. Table 2 provides an overview of the number of articles per upstream CSR phase at 5-year intervals per journal reviewed. The seven articles that fell under both categories were counted as one in each category. As a result of this limited double counting, the total number of articles in Table 2 sums up to 157 rather than 150.

Table 2.

Categorization of Academic Publications in Upstream CSR into Contract Responsibility and Full Producer Responsibility.

	Business & Society		Business Ethics Quarterly		Journal of Business Ethics		Total
Period	CUCSR	FPUCSR	CUCSR	FPUCSR	CUCSR	FPUCSR	CUCSR	FPUCSR
1980-1985	0	0	0	0	4	0	4	0
1986-1990	1	0	0	0	3	1	4	1
1991-1995	1	0	1	4	0	2	2	6
1996-2000	1	1	4	6	4	2	9	9
2001-2005	1	4	4	2	14	7	19	13
2006-2010	3	9	8	10	32	28	43	47
Total	7	14	17	22	57	40	81	76

Note. The table count sums to 157, because 7 articles are double counted as explained in the text. A complete list of the 150 articles included in the analysis of the scholarly discourse on upstream CSR is available on request. Please contact the corresponding author. CSR = corporate social responsibility; CUCSR = contract upstream CSR; FPUCSR = full producer upstream CSR.

Publications on full producer upstream CSR issues appeared only sporadically between the 1980s and 1990s (Christensen, 1997; Getz, 1997). However, since the new millennium, a considerable increase in articles discussing full producer upstream CSR issues can be observed compared to the increase in articles about contract upstream CSR. The majority of articles on full producer upstream CSR were published between 2006 and 2010: 9 of the 14 articles in Business & Society (64%), and 28 of the 40 articles in Journal of Business Ethics (70%). Considering the total amount of articles on full producer upstream CSR, 47 of the 76 articles were published between 2006 and 2010 (61%). The increased interest in the broader upstream CSR debate can also be seen by the growth of articles with human rights as a subject term. Between 1980 and 2000, there were 13 articles on upstream CSR issues published with human rights as a subject term. Between 2001 and 2010, that number more than doubled, with 28 articles on upstream CSR issues being published with that subject term.

The growing academic interest in business and human rights mirrors the practical debate on upstream CSR as manifesting in NGO activities and campaigns. One conclusion of this literature review is that the practical and academic debates on upstream CSR have coevolved, both moving from a narrow debate on worker rights to a broader debate on human rights. The authors’ intention here is not to examine a causal relationship between the practical and the scholarly debate on upstream CSR. The authors do abstain from speculating about the causal relation between both debates, making no claims on whether NGO campaigning and the related media coverage triggered the scientific debate or whether there is a reverse causality. For the sake of the presented argument, it is sufficient to demonstrate that both debates move in a similar direction, broadening the scope of corporate responsibility and reconceptualizing it in such a way that two different logics—the contract responsibility and the full producer responsibility—emerge. Both the NGO campaigns and the scholarly debate target the same challenges which result from the accelerating globalization of production activities which can be observed during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.

Academic Perception: Contract Upstream CSR

In the spirit of contract upstream CSR, scholars specifically refer to legal and ethical theories to fortify NGO demands for corporate responsibility of sweatshops. Building on the legal approach of respondeat superior, Santoro (2000) argues that the parent corporation is responsible for legal as well as labor rights violations of its direct supply contractors if the violations occur during the currency of their contract. Using Kantian ethics, Arnold and Bowie (2003) derive specific corporate duties such as providing living wages and safety standards for employees in suppliers’ factories. This mirrors the NGO demands of the traditional upstream CSR phase in which NGOs focused on labor rights issues at corporate contractors (Green, 1998; Kernaghan, 1998). Other researchers argued that, in a corporation–supplier relationship, the more powerful entity bears the greater stake of responsibility (Reed, 1999). Taking a different approach, Donaldson and Dunfee (1994) followed social contract theory to argue in favor of corporate responsibility for direct suppliers. Their integrative social contract theory accounts for contextual differences and at the same time guarantees the respect of hypernorms (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1994). Logsdon and Wood (2002), arguing along the lines of Donaldson and Dunfee (1994), apply the universal concept of business citizenship which views corporations as global responsibility actors with the duty of adhering to universal human rights.

As the corporations reacted to contract upstream CSR demands with codes of conduct as discussed earlier, scholars examined these codes of conduct extensively (see the meta-study of Collins, 2000; Weaver, 1993). Even though codes of conduct are criticized for lacking clarity and ambiguity (Emmelhainz & Adams, 1999), there appears to be an implicit assumption that they apply to direct suppliers only: Research on their effectiveness focuses on empirical studies with direct corporate contractors (Egels-Zandén, 2007). In their research, Kolk and van Tulder (2002) discuss the complexity and difficulty for MNCs to extend their codes beyond direct suppliers and conclude that this might not be realistic. However, as discussed in the first part of the article, NGOs have successfully extended the notion of CSR, which was acknowledged in business ethics research, especially from the new millennium onward.

Academic Perception: Full Producer Upstream CSR

The enlarged demands toward MNCs regarding their complicity in human rights violations (Global Witness, 2009; Steinweg, 2010) manifest in research. Scholars advanced their theories gradually to examine this trend in upstream CSR, and examined new concepts, such as the sphere of influence (Matten & Crane, 2005; Young, 2006).

The apartheid discussion was a forerunner to the debate on corporate involvement in human rights violations within the corporate sphere of influence (see Fieldhouse, 2005; Rohter, 1985). NGOs argued that MNCs indirectly supported and approved apartheid through their business presence in South Africa and demanded corporate divestment (Schutt, 1998). While this debate was an isolated and special case, the globalization of production activities placed the human rights problems on center stage and politicized the debate on CSR in academia. Since the new millennium, it can be observed that the human rights debate covered numerous subjects of academic interest: corporate activities in conflict zones (Idahosa, 2002; Wettstein, 2010), corporations’ roles in peace (Fort & Schipani, 2004; J. Nelson, 2000), in global governance (Kobrin, 2008; Scherer, Palazzo, & Baumann, 2006), in censorship (Brenkert, 2009; Schrempf, 2011), corruption (Misangyi, Weaver, & Elms, 2008), and public health (Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004).

The concept of sphere of influence became important in fortifying NGOs’ demands along corporate supply chains. Scholars have started to refine and clarify the concept by highlighting its two key components: do no harm (Santoro, 2009) and enable problem solutions (Young, 2006). “Do no harm” forms the primary duty which Santoro (2009) defines as to not violate any fundamental human rights—neither directly nor as an accomplice. The doctrine of do no harm is strongly linked to the concept of complicity which gained publicity in CSR practice and research (Clapham, 2006). Hsieh (2009) argues that MNCs “have a responsibility to promote well-ordered social and political institutions in host countries that lack them” (p. 251).

“Enable problem solutions” adverts to the facilitation of social and economic rights as envisaged, for instance, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the United Nations. The core of enabling problem solutions is to consider political infrastructure and structural injustices (Young, 2006). Enabling problem solutions means scrutinizing existing injustices and societal problems. Corporations can play a crucial role in facilitating positive changes. Matten and Crane (2005) refer to such activities as corporate citizenship. Academics increasingly consider corporations’ involvement and potential in fostering positive changes in various areas such as education, social security, human rights, protection, and social ills (Margolis & Walsh, 2003).

Hence, the academic perception of the broader upstream CSR demands by NGOs translates into a politicization of CSR (Scherer & Palazzo, 2011). The key argument of this debate is that globalization brought about a change in the balance of power between business and politics. While corporations have expanded their operations globally, the regulatory power of governments has remained limited to national boundaries (Matten & Crane, 2005; Scherer et al., 2006). Furthermore, for several decades, production activities, including the exploitation of resources, have been shifting to weak or nondemocratic regulatory contexts. MNCs operate in zones of conflict, collaborate with repressive regimes, and produce in countries where governments are unable or unwilling to enforce human rights (Brenkert, 2009; Matten & Crane, 2005). As a result, corporations often operate in a regulatory vacuum and get entangled in various social and environmental problems. A key observation of scholars advocating a politicized view of CSR is that private actors, such as corporations or NGOs, practice self-regulation by developing behavioral standards and complying with them voluntarily (Detomasi, 2007). In political sciences, sociology, and political philosophy, the debate over private regulation started in the 1990s, when the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered a discussion of the consequences of that event for the political organization of the 20th-century nation state order. Rosenau and Czempiel (1992), for instance, expected a rise in private regulation, which they labeled governance with and without government. Held et al. (1999) described the global transformation of political, cultural, and economic processes, Habermas (2001) examined the normative consequences of this “postnational constellation” of regulation, and Ulrich Beck (2000) described the growing influence of civil society on political decision making as “politics from below.” Initially, as Scherer and Palazzo (2007) argued, this analysis of deep societal transformation was largely ignored among scholars in the business and society domains, where governance continued to be understood as the ability of national governments to create stable regulatory frameworks around corporations. The shift toward the politicization of CSR (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007) mirrors the changes with regard to the evolution of NGO campaigning against MNCs.

Conclusion

Since the 1980s, upstream CSR issues have been receiving increasing attention in the public debate and academia. Because there are several conceptual differences between CSR demands of the 1980s/1990s and those of today, the authors argue that it is reasonable to distinguish between two phases, labeled as contract upstream CSR and full producer upstream CSR. Reviewing NGO activism and campaigning over the last 30 years revealed that NGOs changed their approach from a focus on contracts between MNCs and their direct suppliers to a focus on a more loose connection between MNCs and all entities along the complete supply chain. Moreover, NGOs have changed their initial opposition toward MNCs to a more cooperative spirit. This development in NGO pressure has led to a qualitative change in the upstream CSR debate in CSR scope, CSR depth, and CSR management practice.

The authors’ main thesis that there has been a shift in upstream CSR discourse derives from their review of NGO campaigns between 1980 and 2010. Comparing the first NGO campaigns and activities with the latest NGO campaigns and activities in each of the nine industries illustrated a major difference in CSR scope and depth. For instance, while the first campaigns by the Clean Clothes Campaign, the NLC, and Centre for Research on Multinational Corporation (SOMO) against garment corporations focused on labor rights issues at the end of the 1980s, the latest campaigns by the EJF targeting corporations from the very same industry focus on CSR issues that are deeper in the supply chain (clean cotton) and broader (human rights). Having identified such differences between early and more recent NGO campaigns in each industry serves as a strong indication and evidence for the authors’ main conclusion that upstream CSR issues have qualitatively evolved.

Summarizing the analysis, the authors find that the traditional contract upstream CSR debate follows a legalistic logic and focuses on worker rights and the direct relations between MNCs and their suppliers. Those corporations targeted by NGOs often reacted by including codes of conduct in their contracts with suppliers and enforced them through individual auditing systems. The more recent development in the upstream CSR debate, full producer CSR, operates with a broader agenda. From human rights to complicity with repressive regimes to environmental challenges, it includes all operations upstreaming the value chain as well as their respective geopolitical contexts. Such a concept of upstream CSR follows a political logic that manifests in more collaborative and deliberative solutions: individual corporate initiatives are less important than MSIs that provide solutions on a broader scale—across industries and beyond. Instead of individual codes of conduct, such initiatives produce soft law regulation (Mena & Palazzo, 2012).

The evolution of upstream CSR into a broader political conception raises numerous questions which future research should address. While reviewing the NGO activities, some questions about the legitimacy of NGO activities and demands kept reemerging. Therefore, the authors end the article with a brief review of two critical challenges for future research.

CSR Issue Emergence

The review of the NGO activities over the last few decades reveals that NGOs gradually shifted their focus from worker rights violations to the broader sphere of human rights violations. As Zadek (2004) mentions, “the trick, then, is for companies to be able to predict and credibly respond to society’s changing awareness of particular issues” (p. 127). The challenge is to determine why certain issues make their way into the public civil society agenda at a particular time. Problems such as child labor in outsourcing production activities have already been there for a long time; however, they only gained public momentum during the last 20 years. Future research needs to investigate why certain issues remain dormant and why other issues emerge, evolve, and gain public awareness (Bonardi & Keim, 2005; Zadek, 2004). For example, Dahan and Gittens (2010) use the debate about CSR issues in the cocoa industry, to illustrate such a process of issue emergence. Future research might find a more comprehensive explanation for the emergence of full producer upstream CSR.

Legitimacy Challenges

NGOs and corporations are increasingly involved in global governance. By their self-regulatory engagement, they assume a political role for which they have no democratic mandate. Originally, governments had the monopoly over the process of administering, enabling, and securing human, civil, political, and social rights. But, owing to oppressive regimes or failed states, it may not always be possible to secure such rights; therefore, corporations are increasingly required to get politically involved to secure such rights (Matten & Crane, 2005). But, how can the political engagement of corporations and NGOs be legitimized (Baur & Palazzo, 2011)?

In conclusion, this article illustrates how the debate about worker rights violations in corporate supply chains evolved since the 1980s. The problems with sweatshop working conditions of direct suppliers remain a highly complex challenge for MNCs such as Nike and Apple, who are far from tackling the problem efficiently (Duhigg & Barboza, 2012). However, as the authors demonstrated, the debate on upstream CSR has become much broader. What began as a debate on sweatshops has morphed, over time, into a broader debate that does not replace the critical analysis of sweatshop working conditions, but instead creates a higher order debate on the moral and political responsibility of businesses in a globalizing world.

Footnotes

Appendix

Table A1.

Examples of Main NGO Campaigns by Industry.

Sportswear industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1994	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	Agir Ici	Sports industry
1995	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	CCC	Nike
1995	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	Christian Aid	Sports industry
1996	Foulball Campaign: Child labor in football stitching	International Labor Rights Forum	Sports industry
1996	Take responsibility for bad working conditions in contractor factories	Global Exchange	Nike
1997	Official formation of United Students Against Sweatshops	USAS	Sports industry (universities)
1997	Child labor and bad working conditions	Christian Aid	Sports industry
1997	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	Vietnam Labor Watch	Nike
1997	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	Asia Monitor Resource Centre, Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee	Nike, Reebok
1999	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	Südwind	adidas Group, Nike
2000	Child labor and bad working conditions in football stitching	India Committee of Netherlands	Sports industry
2000	Euro 2000: Improve labor conditions	CCC	Sports industry
2001	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	CCC	adidas Group
2001	Labor rights violations in contractor factories persist	National Labor Committee	Nike
2002	Bad working conditions in contractor factories	CCC, Global Exchange, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Community Aid Abroad; Maquila Solidarity Network	Nike, adidas Group
2002	Child labor and bad working conditions	Global March	Sports industry
2002	Fair Pay Campaign: Improve working conditions	CCC	Sports industry
2004	Play Fair at the Olympics campaign: Ensure that suppliers and subcontractors respect labor rights	CCC, Global Unions, Oxfam	Sports industry
2005	Sweat-Free Campus Campaign	USAS	(Sports industry/universities)
2006	Responsibility for labor rights violations	Oxfam America	Sports industry
2008	Play Fair campaign: Ensure that suppliers and subcontractors respect labor rights	CCC	Sports industry
2008	Child labor in football stitching	Bachpan Bachao Andolan; International Labor Rights Forum	Sports industry
2010	Responsibility for labor rights violations	NLC	Reebok
Garment industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1988	Improve working conditions in supplier factories	CCC	C&A
1989	Allow labor unions	SOMO	C&A
1989	Missing labor unions in factories	NLC; Human Rights Watch	Phillips van-Heusen
1993	Respect labor rights	NLC	The Gap
1993	Recognition of the worker union by supplier in Honduras	NLC	J.C. Penney
1995	Bad working conditions in contractors’ factories	NLC	The Gap
1995	Reimburse El Salvadoran workers for unpaid wages	Sweatshop Watch	Clothes retailers
1996	Ethics on the Label campaign: Take responsibility for worker rights violations in sweatshops	CCC	Clothes retailers and supermarkets
1996	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	MLC	Disney, J.C. Penney
1996	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	NLC	Kathie Lee Gifford
1996	European Education Campaign tour: Bad working conditions	CCC, SOMO	Garment industry
1997	Responsibility for bad working conditions in sweatshops	CCC	Garment industry
1997	H&M is criticized for the working conditions in factories in Indonesia	CCC	H&M
1997	Support union at contractor factory	Human Rights Watch	Phillips van-Heusen
1998	Fair Wear Campaign in Australia: Responsibility for bad working conditions	CCC	Garment industry
1998	Responsibility for sweatshops	CAFOD	Clothes retailers
1999	Responsibility for sweatshops	Global Exchange	The Gap
2001	Leave Burma	Berne Declaration; CCC	Triumph
2002	Responsibility for bad working conditions in sweatshops in Southern Africa	SOMO	Clothes retailers
2003	Illegal worker lock out	CCC	Tom Tailor
2003	Labor rights violations in contractor factories	NLC	J.C. Penney and Sears
2005	Improve cotton sourcing conditions	International Crisis Group	Cotton traders and retailers
2005	Respect international labor laws in the sourcing of cotton	EJF	Cotton traders and retailers
2006	Responsibility for working conditions	SOMO	Clothes retailers
2006	Launch of cotton campaign: Stop child labor	International Labor Rights Forum	Garment industry
2007	Stop child labor in cotton production and improve working conditions	EJF	Cotton traders and retailers
2009	Stop child labor in cotton production and improve working conditions	EJF	Cotton traders and retailers
2009	Monitor supply chain; discourage the usage of dangerous pesticides	EJF	Cotton traders and retailers
2009	Usage of sweatshops including sourcing cotton from Uzbekistan	International Labor Rights Forum	Garment industry
2010	Stop child labor in cotton production and improve working conditions	EJF	Cotton traders and retailers
2010	Use clean cotton	EJF	H&M, Inditex
Toy industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1997	Responsibility for worker rights’ violations in contractor factory	Coalition for the Charter on the Safe Production of Toys	McDonald’s
1999	Bad working conditions in Thai toy factories	NLC	Toy industry
1999	“Play Fair” campaign in Germany: Responsibility for working conditions in contractors’ factories	Werkstatt Ökonomie	German toy industry
2001	Responsibility for working conditions in contractor’s factories	NLC	Wal-Mart, Toys “R” Us, Hasbro, Mattel/Fisher Price, Disney, and McDonald’s
2001	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	China Labor Watch	McDonalds, Disney, Hasbro, Mattel, Warner, Paramount, Franklin Mint, and DC Comics
2002	Responsibility for bad working conditions in contractors’ factories; ineffective audits	NLC	Mattel, MAG, Sega, Wal-Mart
2002	Toy campaign: Responsibility for working conditions at contractors	Belgian CCC	Carrefour, Cora, Colruyt/ Dreamland, Maxitoys
2002	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	Belgian CCC	Disney
2004	Implement better labor practice policies and improve working conditions	SwedWatch	Top Toy, COOP, and Brio
2005	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	Berne Declaration	Swiss toy industry
2005	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	SACOM	Disney
2005	Improve labor standards in factories	China Labor Watch	McDonald’s, KFC, Hasbro, and Mattel
2005	Boycott of Wal-Mart toys	China Labor Watch and NLC	Wal-Mart
2006	Be transparent, improve code of conduct enforcement and monitoring system and take responsibility for working conditions in factories	SACOM	Disney
2006	Implement social standards; monitor and train employees	Berne Declaration	Swiss toy industry
2007	Improve working conditions in contractor factories	SACOM	Wal-Mart
2007	Improve working conditions in contractor factories	SACOM	Disney
2007	Improve working conditions in contractor factories	SACOM	Disney
2007	Improve working conditions in contractor factories	SACOM	Disney
2007	Responsibility for bad working conditions in several factories such as the Hansheng Wood Products Factory	NLC	R2C
2008	Responsibility for working conditions in their contractors’ factories	NLC	Disney; Hasbro and RC2
2008	Responsibility for bad working conditions in the factory producing Ernie and other toys	NLC	K’NEX, Sesame Street, and Hasbro
2009	Responsibility for working conditions in factories	SACOM, Südwind Agentur, Peuples Solidaires, Society for Fair Trade, AUR, Polish Green Network	Toy industry
IT industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
2004	Improve working conditions at contractors’ factories	CAFOD	Dell, Hewlett–Packard, and IBM
2005	ICT companies violate labor rights	SOMO	Computer hardware industry
2005	Violations of labor rights	SOMO	Fujitsu Siemens, Acer
2005	Take responsibility for CSR issues	SOMO	Fujitsu Siemens, Acer
2006	Violation of labor laws	SACOM	Motorola
2006	Increase transparency and accountability	SOMO	IBM, HP, Dell, Apple Mac, Compaq, Canon, Sony, and Philips
2006	Violations of and responsibility for labor rights in entire supply chain	SOMO	Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG
2007	Include extractive industry in their supply chain management	SOMO	ICT industry
2007	Violations of labor rights	Bread for all	Hewlett–Packard, Dell, Acer, Apple, and Fujitsu Siemens
2007	Violations of labor rights violations in supply chain	SOMO	Mobile phone industry
2007	Violations of labor rights at subtier suppliers	SOMO	Fujitsu Siemens, Acer, Sony, Dell, Hewlett–Packard
2007	Violations of labor rights	SOMO	ICT industry
2007	Include the extractive industry in supply chain management and solve problems in sphere of influence (labor, health, pollution)	SwedWatch	ICT industry
2007	Include the extractive industry in supply chain management	Finn Watch	ICT industry
2008	Sustainable and just production of mobile phones	Time to Turn	Mobile phone industry
2008	Violations of labor rights	WEED	ICT industry
2008	Violations of labor rights	SOMO	Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG
2008	Responsibility for labor rights violations in the complete supply chain	SOMO & SwedWatch	Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, Apple
2009	Responsibility for labor rights violations in the complete supply chain	FinnWatch, SACOM, SOMO	Microsoft, Motorola, Philips, Apple, Sony
2009	Violations of labor rights	SOMO	ICT industry
2009	Violations of labor rights	SOMO	Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson
2009	Responsibility for labor and human rights violations and for environmental impact in the supply chain	SOMO	KPN, Tele 2, Vodafone, T-Mobile
2009	Violations of labor rights	SOMO, Swed Watch	Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG
2009	Do not use minerals from conflict zones	Global Witness	Mobile phone industry
2009	Responsibility for labor rights violations in factories producing keyboards	NLC	Hewlett–Packard, Lenovo, Microsoft, IBM, Dell
Diamond industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1998	Finance of civil war in Angola	Global Witness	De Beers
1999	Do not buy conflict diamonds and be transparent	Human Rights Watch	Diamond Industry
2000	Do not buy conflict diamonds and be transparent	Partnership Africa Canada	De Beers
2002	Foster transparent diamond trade	Partnership Africa Canada	Diamond Industry
2002	“Publish What You Pay” campaign	Global Witness, CAFOD, Open Society Institute, Oxfam GB, Save the Children UK and Transparency International UK	Diamond industry
2003	Complicity in forced removal of indigenous community	Survival International	De Beers
2005	Respect human rights	Wilson Center	Diamond Industry
2005	“No Dirty Gold” campaign: Human rights and environmental violations in Africa	Oxfam America	Diamond Industry
2007	Lack of adequate policies to combat blood diamonds	Global Witness, Amnesty International	U.S. jewelry retailers
2009	Do not buy conflict diamonds and be transparent	Human Rights Watch	Diamond Industry
Oil industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1990	Human rights violations	Global Exchange	Oil industry
1995	Respect human rights	Human Rights Watch	Shell
1995	Do not sink oil platform Brent Spar in the North Sea. Boycott Shell	Greenpeace	Shell
1996	Do not operate in Burma	Earth Rights International	Total, Unocal
1996	Complicity in human rights violations in Nigeria	Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP)	Shell
1996	Complicity in human rights violations in Burma	Burmese population	Unocal
1999	Be transparent	Global Witness	Oil industry
1999	Responsibility for human rights violations in Nigeria	Human Rights Watch	Oil industry
1999	Be transparent	Human Rights Watch	Oil industry
2000	Complicity in human rights violations in Burma	Earth Rights International	Unocal, Total
2000	Complicity in human rights violations	Amnesty International	Oil industry
2000	Complicity in human rights and environmental violations in Nigeria	Essential Action, Global Exchange	Shell
2000	Urge Indonesian government to investigate the murder of activists	Human Rights Watch	ExxonMobil
2001	Complicity in human rights violations	Presbyterian Church of Sudan	Talisman
2002	Irresponsible environmental attitude	Greenpeace	Esso
2002	Complicity in human rights violations in Burma	Earth Rights International	Total, Unocal, Premier Oil
2003	Irresponsible environmental attitude and complicity in human rights violations	Greenpeace	Esso
2003	Be transparent and noncomplicit in human rights violations in Sudan	Human Rights Watch	Talisman; Lundin Petroleum AB, TotalFinaElf; Shell
2004	Take responsibility for Valdez disaster	Greenpeace	Esso
2004	Do not do short-term investments in politically unstable countries such as Chad and Cameroon	Greenpeace	Esso
2004	Co-responsibility for oil spill in Russia	Greenpeace	Total
2004	Encourage governments to be transparent	Human Rights Watch	Oil companies operating in Angola
2005	Complicity in human rights violations	Oil Watch	ChevronTexaco
2006	Take responsibility for Valdez disaster	Greenpeace	Esso
2005	Investigate complicity in human rights violations and publish those	Amnesty International	Shell, Chevron
2005	Become environmentally responsible	Greenpeace	Oil industry
2008	Complicity in human rights violations in Burma	Earth Rights International	Chevron
2009	Complicity in human rights violations in Burma	Earth Rights International	Chevron, Total
2009	Complicity in environmental and human rights violations	Various	Chevron
Coffee industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1977	Boycott coffee from Uganda since the trade benefits dictator Idi Amin	Activists	Coffee industry
1988	Encourage fair trade coffee	Solidaridad	Coffee industry
1989	Coffee exports fund military death squads in El Salvador during the Civil War	Neighbor to Neighbor	Gerneral Foods, Folgers (Procter & Gamble) and Nestlé
1990	Boycott Folgers	Neighbor to Neighbor	Folgers (P&G)
1994	Pay fair wages, improve working conditions	US/LEAP	Starbucks
1996	Improve working conditions and monitor suppliers	US/LEAP	Starbucks
1999	Support fair trade coffee	Global Exchange	Coffee industry
2000	Buy fair trade coffee beans	Global Exchange	Starbucks
2000	Improve working conditions	Global Exchange	Starbucks
2001	Buy fair trade certified coffee beans	Global Exchange	Folgers/ P&G
2002	Support fair trade	Oxfam America	Coffee industry
2002	Improve working and living conditions of coffee farmers	Oxfam America	Coffee industry
2002	Join the Global Coffee Rescue Program and pay fair prices	Oxfam America	Coffee industry
2003	Buy fair trade coffee beans	Berne Declaration	Coffee industry
2006	Bad working and living conditions of coffee farmers	Oxfam America	Coffee industry
2007	Support Ethiopian coffee farmers	Oxfam America	Starbucks
Chocolate industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
2000	Improve economic and social well-being of farmers	International Institute of Tropical Agriculture	Chocolate industry
2001	Stop child labor	International Institute of Tropical Agriculture	Chocolate industry
2002	Fair Trade Cocoa Campaign: Buy fair trade certified cocoa	Global Exchange	Chocolate industry
2002	Stop child labor	International Labor Rights Forum	Nestlé, Cargill, ADM
2003	Stop child labor and support fair trade	Global Exchange	M&M/Mars
2005	Stop child labor	Global Exchange	Chocolate industry
2007	Improve working and living situation of cocoa farmers	SwedWatch	Cloetta Fazer, Kraft Foods, Nestlé
2007	Finance of Civil War on Ivory Coast	Global Witness	Chocolate industry
2008	Improve working and living situation of cocoa farmers	Oxfam	Chocolate industry
2009	Stop child labor and pay fair wages	Berne Declaration	Swiss chocolate industry
2009	Stop child labor	International Labor Rights Forum	Hershey, M&M/Mars and Nestlé
Banana industry
Date	Upstream CSR demand	NGO	Target of CSR demand
1992	Participation in Better Banana Project	Rainforest Alliance	Chiquita
1993	Improve working conditions	COLSIBA	Banana industry
1996	Corporate responsibility for fair and sustainable production	Banana Link	Banana industry
1998	Cease pesticide usage and support union rights	COLSIBA; US/LEAP, EUROBAN	Chiquita
1999	Improve working conditions	UK Food Group	Banana industry
2000	Respect worker rights	The Fairtrade Foundation	Banana industry
2001	Stop race to the bottom	COLSIBA, US/LEAP Global Exchange; EUROBAN;	Dole
2002	Improve working conditions	Human Rights Watch	Banana industry
2006	Improve working conditions	US/LEAP; COLSIBA	Dole
2007	Improve working conditions	Berne Declaration	Banana industry
2007	Improve working conditions and avoid human rights violations	ActionAid	Banana industry, supermarkets
2008	Responsibility for human rights violations	Oxfam Germany	Discounters

The article was accepted during the editorship of Duane Windsor.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Judith Schrempf-Stirling (PhD, University of Lausanne) is an assistant professor of management at Robins School of Business, University of Richmond. Her research interests focus on corporate social responsibility, business and human rights, and responsible consumption. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Business Horizons, and Journal of Business Ethics.

Guido Palazzo (PhD, University of Marburg) is a professor of business ethics at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). His research interests are in corporate social responsibility, (un)ethical decision making, and organized crime. He is the associate editor of Business Ethics Quarterly and European Management Review and member of the editorial board of Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, and Journal of Management Studies. His work has appeared in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Management Studies.

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