The Rise of Global Corporate Social Responsibility: Mining and the Spread of Global Norms

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-forgranted 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 rationalchoice 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 Reviews 839