Abstract
Given the dramatic rise in the globalization of production of goods and services since the 1990s, it is somewhat surprising that scholarly attention to the consequences of those globalization processes has been slow to recognize the cross-national dimensions of corporate social responsibility, much less coalesce around definitive research programs. Hevina Dashwood’s examination of the impact of global norms on the mining industry is a study that brings several theoretical and empirical threads together in a coherent manner that can inform the work of globalization, organizations, and management scholars interested in issues in corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility (CSR)—business attention to social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance—has long been at the center of controversies for companies in the extractive industries, of which mining companies have been heavily scrutinized by nongovernmental organizations and government regulatory agencies. In The Rise of Global Corporate Social Responsibility, Dashwood asks why mining companies have been receptive to CSR efforts to constrain their activities despite the increased scrutiny and constraint on their activities that CSR engagement would bring. Dashwood’s answer, based on her analysis of CSR in the global mining industry and case studies of how three Canadian mining companies responded to external CSR pressures, offers contributions to the literature on CSR that are much needed: a focus on CSR at the global level, a three-level institutional framework, and an analysis of internal organizational dynamics that contributes to CSR engagement.
A significant issue in existing CSR studies is how to explain variation in CSR engagement among firms. Institutional approaches point to a growing consolidation of norms, principles, and frameworks that highlight how CSR has now become a taken-for-granted feature of the business environment. Much of this institutional consolidation has taken place at the global level, featuring the efforts of prominent global actors—state actors, nongovernmental organizations, and even corporations themselves—to construct frameworks to regulate firms’ social and environmental practices. As Dashwood details, the creation of the International Council on Metals and the Environment in 1991 is an early example of such a coordinated effort. Given these efforts, one would expect CSR engagement among firms to be relatively uniform. Yet, there exists significant variation in both the timing of that CSR engagement (early versus late adopters) as well as the degree of commitment that firms display (some firms were leaders in global CSR efforts), suggesting that internal organizational factors may also be significant.
The approach this book takes to explaining these developments in CSR in the mining industry is a creative one: a three-level institutional framework that synthesizes rational-choice institutionalism, new institutional theory, and historical institutionalism. From historical institutionalism, Dashwood analyzes critical junctures in the mining industry, including restricted access to markets and financing, environmental disasters and controversies, tighter regulations in developed countries, and sustained pressures from social movement organizations, that led CSR to be a focus issue for mining companies in the 1990s. From new institutional theory and constructivist approaches in international relations, Dashwood focuses on the diffusion of global CSR norms that first exerted external pressures on companies in the mining industry to attend to social and environmental issues as well as cognitive dimensions at the firm-level that led mining companies to frame their CSR approaches in broader sustainable development terms. From rational-choice institutionalism, Dashwood describes how management executives from two prominent Canadian mining companies, Noranda and Placer Dome, were able strategically to respond to and take the lead in demands for more stringent environmental oversight of global mining companies.
The book’s three-level institutional theoretical framework is an appropriate and innovative approach to making sense of the multi-faceted nature of CSR issues and the multiple levels through which global CSR norms develop. Empirically, such an approach is able to make sense of both global institutional developments as well as variation in a firm’s response to CSR pressures. The range of events and developments in CSR as they impact the mining industry, comprehensively documented by Dashwood, is remarkable. Complex empirical realities such as how sustained NGO scrutiny, limited locations for resource extraction, senior management leadership, and prominent environmental mishaps interfaced to create varied approaches to CSR among mining companies cannot be well served by perspectives limited only to either side of the external/internal and normative/rational-choice debates in the literature. Theoretically, the book’s three-level institutionalism also joins an emerging conversation within sociology about how to reconcile explanations of structure, agency, and contingency, and provides a thorough application of what such a synthesis would look like in a concrete empirical setting. The structure-agency-contingency conversation is an ongoing one and Dashwood’s agency-centered institutionalism shows how social scientific approaches can take the lead in new scholarship on the emergence and outcomes of the global sustainability movement.
Readers will glean most from the book’s in-depth look at how internal organizational factors shaped differential responses to global CSR, here presented in three case studies of prominent Canadian mining companies: Noranda, Placer Dome, and Barrick Gold. Based on extensive interviews with firm executives, Dashwood makes a strong and convincing case that the role of senior management was crucial to explaining variations in company responses to global CSR pressures. In the case of Noranda and Placer Dome, senior executives and especially environmentally-conscious CEOs were quick and keen to respond not only to external events but also to engage proactively with social and environmental stakeholders at the global level to contribute to dialogues about evolving environmental standards in the mining industry. Whether to preempt government regulation, foster an organizational culture around sustainability issues, or even to confront investment decisions in developing countries with little to no regulatory oversight, the case studies in the book provide a very detailed look at how internal organizational dynamics dramatically shape how businesses engage with CSR issues.