This event approaches marketplace activism in its various forms. These include targeting corporations to introduce responsible corporate behaviours, but also collaborating with business to change the legislation. As our speakers will show, market techniques and ideas can be used to counter dominant economic and social actors and positively intervene in developing social and environmental sustainability.
Location: Bedford Square Room 0-03
The invited speakers are Professor Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier (Centre de sociologie des organisations, Sciences Po, France), Professor Frank de Bakker (Center for Organizational Responsibility, IÉSEG School of Management, France), and Professor Frank den Hond (Hanken School of Economics, Finland & VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands).
The distinguished speakers will share insights from their latest research (details and bios below).
The seminar is organised together by CHRONOS’ “Critical Consumption and Politics of Markets” and CRIS.
Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier: Anti-corporate activism, contentious valuation of economic activities and market change
The contentiousness of markets has recently been assessed by the social movements literature. Activists can use a broad range of tactics to force corporations to change their practices. This paper questions the outcomes of this contentiousness. It draws from an empirical study on a disruptive tactic used by anti-corporate activists: shame-on-you prize. I propose to adopt an economic sociological perspective to understand the mechanisms by which social movement organizations seek to undermine the values that underline economic order. Activists provide new categories for valuating economic activities that challenge existing ones. Social movement organizations legitimate these valuations as coming from civil society and reflecting public expectations about what should count in valuations of economic activities. As such, they may encourage public decision-makers to undertake regulatory action.
Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier is research professor at Sciences Po and CNRS, and deputy director of the Center for the Sociology of Organizations in Paris, France. Her research is situated in the field of economic sociology, and her focus is on the social construction of consumers and markets. Her aim is to understand how consumers’ economic behaviour is progressively shaped by the relationship between corporations’ practice, government, and social movements. She published Ethical Consumption (Fernwood Publishing, 2013), Gouverner les Conduites (Presses de Sciences Po, 2016) and co-authored Le biais comportementaliste (Presses de Sciences Po, 2018). Her work has appeared in several academic journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, Sociologia Ruralis, and International Journal of Consumer Studies.
Frank de Bakker (with Pierpaolo Parrotta and Marianna Marino): Sustainable entrepreneurship as emancipation: The unusual case of an organization countering the mafia
In this paper we present a detailed case study of GOEL, an organization that plays an important role in countering the widespread institutionalized crime experienced in Calabria. GOEL combines social entrepreneurship, cooperation and free market mechanisms in order to fight the dominant position of the mafia within this society. Started in 2003, GOEL is a cooperative group that presents itself as a “redemption community” which has the objective of social and economic change in Calabria through a social entrepreneurship venture, inspired by ethical values, free-market, and circular-economy principles. Based on interviews and document analysis, we build on the notion of ‘entrepreneurship as emancipation’ (Rindova et al., 2009; Jennings et al., 2016) to address the question of how a social entrepreneurship organization can actively combat institutional irresponsibility by offering an emancipatory, responsible alternative. Doing so allows us to examine a category of social issues that has previously been hidden or ignored by management scholars and that examines a power struggle in which responsible organizing is deployed as a way to counter longtime undesirable practices, ingrained within a society. Doing so allows us to evaluate the strategic use of ethical principles to bring together business owners and employees into a highly unfavorable socioeconomic context, and to explore the notion of ‘social entrepreneurship as redemption’.
Frank G.A. de Bakker is full professor of corporate social responsibility at IESEG School of Management in Lille, France where he also coordinates the IESEG Centre for Organizational Responsibility (ICOR). He earned his PhD from the University of Twente. In his research he combines theories on institutions, social movements and stakeholders to examine interactions between activist groups and firms on corporate social responsibility. His work has appeared in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies. Frank is co-editor of Business & Society.
Frank den Hond (with Visa Penttilä, Martin Fougere and Nikodemus Solitander): Multistakeholder activism for CSR–A case study of a campaign for HRDD law in Finland
Much of the literature on multi-stakeholder collaborations for corporate social responsibilities has concentrated on formal soft-law initiatives that aim at, for example, addressing social issues in supply chains. Lobbying for hard law as a political activity by NGOs and corporations has received much less attention in the CSR literature. To provide new insights into such arrangements, we examine a unique case of multi-stakeholder collaboration for lobbying a mandatory CSR law in Finland. We conduct a case study on an NGO-coordinated campaign that called for a human rights due diligence (HRDD) law under the parliamentary elections of 2019. The campaign coalition included over 140 organizations, including NGOs, labour unions and corporations, among which the biggest retailers in Finland. The campaign was successful as the government included a statement on the law in the official governmental agenda. The study is based on analyzing qualitative data from different sources: interviews with campaign participants, internal communications of the campaign, and publicly available materials, such as media texts and recorded public discussions. Our preliminary findings shed light on the emergence of a new issue in the context of CSR, on how disparate actors strategically coordinated political action for mandatory CSR law, and on how and why corporations took part in the campaign for stricter regulation. This project is funded by the Academy of Finland.
Frank den Hond is the Ehrnrooth Professor in Management and Organisation at Hanken School of Economics (Helsinki, Finland) and past Editor of Organization Studies. His research interests have been at the intersection of business in society, institutional organization theory, and social movement studies, and he recently developed interests in business ethics, partial organization and Pragmatism. He has published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies, as well as two edited books, three special issues of academic journals (and one in the making), and numerous book chapters. Frank den Hond served the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) as a board member and he was the main organizer of the 2008 EGOS Colloquium. He currently teaches business ethics and research methods at MSc and PhD levels.
