Between Self-Regulation and the Alien Tort Claims Act: On the Contested Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility

Using Alien Tort Claims Act suits against multinational corporations as an immediate context for discussion, this article explores the emerging field of corporate social responsibility. The article argues for an understanding of concrete legal struggles as part of broader competing strategies for regulating corporate obligations to a multitude of stakeholders. By identifying and analyzing the positions of concrete actors who operate in the field, the main thesis of this article is that the field strongly tilts in the direction of voluntary and self-reliant models of corporate responsibility. The article identifies this process as consistent with the privatization of regulative structures in general and with extant modeling of corporate governance in particular, and points at the correlation between these trends and the interests of multinational corporations.     

Revisiting current strategies for primary prevention of motorcycle collisions in Jamaica

Abstract

Motorcycle Road Traffic Collisions place a heavy burden on emergency medical services in Jamaica. We explore the existing strategies and legislative policies that may prevent or reduce the severity of these injuries in Jamaica. This is an important aspect of health care as it may minimize the impact of these preventable injuries on the limited resources of the health services.     

Colonialism's Civilizing Mission: The Case of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission

This paper examines a particular episode in the history of British imperialism in India: the appointment of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission in 1893. We analyze the way a quasi-judicial investigation into the consumption of drugs was differently conceived and executed as a civilizing mission by, on the one hand, British colonizers, and, on the other hand, an aspiring colonized elite. By bringing together the ideological dimensions of a civilizing mission (e.g., the reliance on scientific knowledge, groper procedures, legal techniques) with its social ones (e.g., collaboration between colonizers and a local elite), we show how the very notion of a civilizing mission became a site of struggle over meaning, identity, and desirable forms of governance. The analysis reveals a local elite struggling to position itself at once on a par with British criteria of scientific competence and yet not as a mere proxy for British interests; at once able to articulate itself in terms of enlightenment concepts such as reason and modernity and yet celebrating its own distinct cultural authenticity.     

Socially Responsible Private Regulation: World‐Culture or World‐Capitalism?

This article analyzes the phenomenon of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR; specifically: social private regulation) in light of two sociological paradigms of globalization: “world‐culture” and “world‐capitalism.” The study treats three analytically distinct features of CSR: the political contestation over its meaning, the role of business studies in transforming it into a managerial model, and its consolidation as a market of authorities. The study finds that (1) while CSR may be theorized as a emergent “world cultural” model, the culture paradigm does not take sufficient account of the role of corporations in shaping it, and (2) while both paradigms recognize the transition from political contestations over the character of CSR to its deployment by means of private regulation, the world‐capitalism paradigm offers stronger tools for theorizing the mechanisms of change that mediate between political agency and institutionalized regulatory outcomes.