How can we reimagine the relationship between academia and activism to provide new opportunities for social change?
Based on an ethnography with an anti-violence feminist collective, this vibrant and vital book develops an interdisciplinary approach to activism and activist research, helping us reimagine the role of scholarship in the fight against social inequality.
With its reflections on novel tools that can be utilized in the fight for social justice, this book will be a valuable resource for academics in critical management studies, sociology, gender studies, and social work as well as practitioners and policymakers across the social services sector.
Consumerism, unsustainable growth, waste and inequalities continue to ail societies across the globe, but creative collectives have been tackling these issues at a grassroots level.
Based on an autoethnographic study about a free food store in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book presents a first-hand account of how a community is organized around surplus food to deal with food poverty, while also helping the reader to see through the complexity that brings the free food store to life.
Examining how alternative economies and relations emerge from these community solutions, the author shows it is possible to think, act and organize differently within and beyond capitalist dynamics.
agenda and politicize our critical research further for a more holistic and nuanced understanding. In doing this, I argue that the performativity debate builds on decades-long scholarly conversations about academic activism ( Reedy and King, 2019 ). It also needs to go beyond its own internal ‘web of discussions’ taking place in the ‘ivory tower’ ( Just et al, 2021 , p 92). I follow Fleming and Banerjee’s (2016) problematization of business managers as interlocutors for social change and build my proposal on their call to engage with activists and social movements
Within the global context of the stark contrast between food poverty and food waste, and the growing momentum in food rescue and redistribution initiatives, this chapter delves into the intricate interplay between academic and activist roles. Drawing on the author’s first-hand experiences at the Free Food Store, and through ‘writing differently’, the chapter explores pivotal moments where these multiple roles and identities intersect and sometimes clash. Additionally, it extends an invitation to envision and cultivate an activist academia that collaborates with communities to ‘change the world’. This text serves as an ongoing, intense dialogue between the author’s activist and academic selves, addressing the critical question of what needs to be done in response to urgent societal challenges. It also represents an earnest endeavour to think, write and, most significantly, take action in a distinctive manner, rooted in embodied experiences, aspirations and imaginations.
It has become almost a truism that global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs) have become a central feature of the contemporary global economy. Powerful lead firms such as Glencore, Apple (the first US company in the world to be valued at US$2 trillion on Wall Street, and only the second in the world after oil giant Saudi Aramco), Airbus or Zara orchestrate the configurations and geographies of these value chains and networks – from extractive industries to software development, aircraft production to garment manufacturing. As GVCs and GPNs have become ever more prevalent phenomena over the last four decades, their importance has been recognised by global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) to formulate economic and social policies and initiatives. In the same vein, social sciences have developed sophisticated analytical frameworks and theories to explain their development, governance and impact on the global economy (Coe and Yeung, 2015; Gereffi, 2018).1 However, recent major events and more gradual global shifts have cast some doubt on the future of GPNs, their organisation and geographies, among the public, policy makers and academics alike.
Since the global expansion of neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards, the world economy faced its first major shock in the form of the global financial crisis of 2007/08. This crisis was followed by a second inflection point when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, temporarily shutting down many national economies first in Asia, then Europe, the Americas and Africa leading to recessions in many countries not seen since the Great Depression of the 20th century.
Inequality within countries and between individuals globally are among today’s crucial development issues. These concerns are generally met with a policy response in the form of measures to enhance ‘competitiveness’ by articulating local firms with the world economy. The principal framing of these measures is by reference to GVCs, which are both the method and units of analysis in a framework seeking to interpret the fragmented muddle of global production (see, for example, World Bank, 2020). Broadly, a GVC is an international chain of market actors bringing commodities from extraction or production of raw materials to the point of consumer retail. The GVC framework has been adopted and adapted by major international financial and development institutions (the OECD, WTO, World Bank, and others), especially for the purposes of framing development aid conditionalities (Neilsen, 2014; Werner et al, 2014).
As it is currently conceived, however, the GVC analytic is a poor lens through which to view wider issues such as wealth distribution and gender inequality, and uncritical deployment of it in a policy making context consequently risks expanding and deepening adverse equality outcomes globally, rather than addressing them. We analyse the key shortcoming of the GVC model as being its uncritical focus on ‘value added’ at each juncture in the chain. ‘Value added’ within a market entity means gross revenues minus costs other than wages, or (which is an accounting identity) profit plus wages. By definition, therefore, an uncritical focus on value added as it arises along a chain fails to take into account the distributional effects of the partition of value added into wages for workers and profit for asset owners.
Sustainability considerations are becoming mainstream in corporate strategy and are affecting the functioning of global value chains (GVCs). Production is moving to locations that can meet basic sustainability specifications in large volumes and at low cost. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) on sustainability have come to play a key role in GVCs.
Because of this new reality, public authorities cannot shape sustainability only through regulation and international agreement formation. They need to orchestrate sustainability through various direct and indirect, hard and soft instruments, and in ways that take into consideration the power dynamics that characterise different GVCs. In this chapter, I examine the different kinds of power dynamics that characterise two specific value chains (coffee and biofuels), and the role that sustainability issues play in them, with particular focus on environmental aspects. What leverage points can be used by public orchestrators and with what instruments in different GVCs? How can various actions (applying different kinds of power) be used to undermine unequal bargaining positions?
The concept of ‘orchestration’ can help with understanding the role of public actors can play in shaping sustainability in a GVC context – as the conductor of an orchestra seeks to make musicians work towards a common goal, public authorities seek to combine different kinds of instruments for the public good (Abbott and Snidal, 2009). Usually, two broad sets of orchestrating mechanisms are operated: ‘directive’ and ‘facilitative’. On the one hand, directive orchestration relies on the authority of the state and seeks to incorporate private initiatives into its regulatory framework (through mandating principles, transparency, codes of conduct).
Today’s GVCs operate in a very different context to the late 20th century when the concept was first developed. With the recent rise in populism, new tariffs are changing cost structures and thus the geography of several GVCs. Many commentators link this rise in protectionism to concerns about the spread of GVCs and the ‘fairness’ of competition between countries with very different labour and environmental standards (Rodrik, 2018). At the same time, civil society in many countries is increasingly critical of trade agreements and there are calls for the re-assessment of their governance, especially in order to ensure a stronger voice for labour and the environmental movement (see FoE, 2018, for a recent summary of some of the key proposals of European civil society). In this context, it seems indispensable to reform the system of policy making and implementation to address these criticisms and make trade policy more responsible.
Achieving a ‘fairer’ global trading system will require a mix of measures – some national, some EU level and some subject to bilateral and multilateral negotiations. In this short chapter, it is not possible to cover all of them. Rather we will focus on the EU level, particularly in relation to its trading relations with developing countries. In the trade policy arena, the EU sees itself as a progressive power, favouring responsible business (Hogan, 2020). It is thus incumbent on it to seek progressive solutions that could subsequently be multilateralised. If the EU can more effectively leverage its trade policy to encourage trading partners to adopt domestic regulation that better protects workers and the environment, it would complement national and EU level regulation, which increasingly requires companies to pay greater attention to negative externalities from their corporate strategies along their supply chains (Hogan, 2020).
The chapter explores the approach adopted by CORE (renamed the Corporate Justice Coalition in April 2021), the civil society coalition on corporate accountability established in the UK in 1998, with regard to recently introduced and proposed laws which require (or would require) companies to identify, and take steps to manage and mitigate, the human rights risks and impacts in their corporate group and supply chains, and considers the prospects for this emerging trend. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, endorsed by the Human Rights Council in 2011 introduced the concept of human rights due diligence (HRDD), a process by which businesses can assess and manage their impacts on human rights. Since then, references to HRDD have begun to be included in legislative instruments in Europe, at both EU and domestic level.
The chapter addresses the early evolution of these requirements, from measures intended to improve corporate transparency (the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive and the UK Modern Slavery Act) to laws and legislative proposals which create, or seek to create, specific legal duties for companies with associated civil or criminal sanctions for management failures that give rise to human rights abuses. This latter category of laws includes the ground-breaking 2017 French ‘Devoir de Vigilance’ law. The chapter provides an overview of these instruments and the ways in which CORE is assessing the political and social dynamics behind their development and adoption, including the corporate response. It also considers the prospects for similar legislation in Europe and beyond, including the possibility of the inclusion of an HRDD requirement in a future EU directive.
Despite a growing consciousness of the social and environmental problems at an international scale, the creation of economic value and short-term profitability tend to remain the central objectives of private and public decision makers. Based on this initial observation, the social cooperative enterprise BASIC (Bureau d’Analyse Sociétale pour une Information Citoyenne) was created in the belief that a lever for change lied in greater awareness and understanding of the link between economic activities and social-environmental issues. BASIC was set up in 2013 as a shared platform to mutualise expertise between academic researchers, civil society organisations and public bodies in order to analyse and question the relevance of current business models, whether at the level of a business sector, a company, a territory or a project, and initiate changes at the level of the societal stakes faced today.
The chapter analyses how BASIC achieves such goals via the generation and dissemination of information, knowledge and tools to understand and measure the impacts of economic activities on society and the planet, so as to stimulate the public debate and foster policy decisions towards an ecological and social transition. BASIC has developed a specific methodological approach in collaboration with academic researchers to analyse value chains, assess their societal impacts and estimate related hidden costs at different scales, from international commodities to local products. So far, the framework has been applied to a number of food value chains (banana, cocoa, tea, rice, shrimps, dairy, beef, fruits and vegetables) as well as textiles (sport brands), publishing and mining products.1
