Fringe stakeholders with limited resources, such as grassroots organizations (GROs), are often ignored in business and society literature. We develop a conceptual framework and a set of propositions detailing how GROs strategically gain legitimacy and influence over time. We argue that GROs encounter specific paradoxes over the emergence, development, and resolution of an issue, and they address these paradoxes using cognitive, moral, and pragmatic legitimacy strategies. While cognitive and moral strategies tend to be used consistently, the flexible and paradoxical use (...) of pragmatic strategies has important consequences, both for GROs’ legitimacy and for their potential influence over powerful organizations associated with them. We enrich our framework with the help of two illustrative cases and discuss the implications of the framework for GROs’ legitimacy strategies in business and society literature. (shrink)

I examine the career advancement facilitators of organizational stakeholders who may be identified as simultaneously “core” and “fringe” in this article, via the insights of 21 leaders with disabilities. To navigate barriers and advance their careers, these leaders benefited from three categories of facilitators, including career self-management strategies, social networks, and organizational and societal factors. Facilitators are synthesized with a metaphor, the three-legged stool, which depicts three foundational pillars that underlie the leaders’ success. Focusing on an understudied element of the (...) social networks pillar, I examine how leaders’ external networks (family, friends, acquaintances, and role models) facilitated their career advancement. Findings point to the role of strong and weak ties in developing leaders’ career self-management strategies as well as their access to core stakeholder positions. Last, contributions, implications, and limitations of this article are discussed. (shrink)

Unpaid care work, including child care, elder care, and housework, is unremunerated work essential to human survival and flourishing. Worldwide, women disproportionally carry out this work, impacting upon their ability to engage in other activities, such as education, employment, or leisure. Despite a growing number of businesses engaging in “gendered CSR,” in the form of women's empowerment projects, attention to unpaid care work remains little discussed in the literature, despite its importance to sustainable development. Applying Diane Elson's feminist economic framework (...) for alleviating unpaid care work inequality to a case study of gendered CSR in Ghana, I find that at present unpaid care work is (a) unrecognised in business’ CSR, (b) may be both reduced or exacerbated by CSR efforts, and (c) remains conceptualised as relevant only to the private sphere, therefore, missing a unique opportunity for business to contribute to gender equality and sustainable development. Connecting unpaid care work and business responsibility contributes to a more expansive understanding of what CSR may be. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Corporate social responsibility has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are (...) engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them ‘from’ or ‘to.’ Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

Cross-sector partnerships are currently praised as capitalism’s key governance instrument to address development challenges. Although some concern has been raised about the effectiveness of such partnerships, little is known about their actual impact. Often it is assumed that partnership outputs transform straightforwardly into societal impact such as poverty alleviation. This article problematizes this assumption. Employing a critical micro-level study, which draws on a qualitative case study of a nongovernmental organization (NGO)–business partnership in Ghana, we examine how outputs provided by a (...) partnership are put to use and perceived as beneficial from the point of view of its beneficiaries. The findings show that the partnership results in what we term “competences without agency” since it provides new resources and knowledge to the beneficiaries but fails to generate the conditions for these to be transformed into significant changes in their lives. Drawing on the concept of empowerment, we propose a new framework, which conceptualizes “impact as empowerment” and highlights currently unrecognized dynamics, which contribute to shaping the ability of a partnership to serve as a development agent. (shrink)

Neoclassical economics has become the predominant school of economic thought, influencing scholarship on management, organizations, and business ethics. However, many feminist economists challenge the individualist and positivist foundations of neoclassical economic epistemology, arguing instead that purportedly gender-neutral and value-free methods routinely and systematically leave out and undervalue women. Extending this proposition, this article introduces the epistemic foundations of feminist economics and illustrates how they can produce novel insights relevant for business ethics. In particular, by examining economic phenomena from the point (...) of view of the people they affect, feminist economic epistemology is able to elucidate the ways in which power asymmetries and gender norms that constitute the social world can be reflected in business practices. I apply this methodological insight to three case studies of global supply chains to challenge the neoclassical assertion that including women in labor markets necessarily catalyzes gender equality. (shrink)

Business and society research has increasingly moved from the margins to the mainstream. Although this progression has benefited from advances in empirical research, the field continues to suffer from considerable methodological challenges that hamper its development. In this introductory article to the special issue, we review how far our field has come in advancing methods and methodologies in business and society research. We also highlight the methods and methodologies covered by the contributors to this special issue and how they help (...) address key shortcomings in our field. Finally, we suggest some promising research methodologies that can address important business and society research challenges going forward. (shrink)

This paper extends Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) scholarship to focus on issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Despite a significant body of work on gender and CSR from a variety of feminist perspectives, long-standing evidence of sexual harassment and sexual violence in business, particularly in global value chains, and the rise of the #MeToo movement, there has been little scholarship focused specifically on these issues in the context of CSR. Our conceptual paper addresses this gap in the literature through (...) two key contributions. First, we extend the theoretical base of CSR scholarship by drawing upon and explicating radical feminist theory, a resource that has been underutilized in the field to date. This theoretical perspective is well placed to offer insights around the issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and to explain the centrality of these concerns to the gender equality agenda in business and in CSR. Second, building upon insights from radical feminism, and from research on CSR and human rights, we explicate a business and human rights approach to sexual harassment, sexual violence and CSR. We point to ways in which this approach might be more effective in addressing these issues than previously adopted strategies and suggest directions for future research arising from our analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article reviews a conversation between business ethicists and feminist scholars begun in the early 1990s and traces the development of that conversation in relation to feminist theory. A bibliographic analysis of the business ethics and corporate social responsibility literatures over a twenty-five-year period elucidates the degree to which gender has been a salient concern, the methodologies adopted, and the ways in which gender has been analyzed. Identifying significant limitations to the incorporation of feminist theory in these literatures, we discuss (...) how feminist scholarship relating to behavior, organizations, and economics could be integrated. We suggest that a better integration of feminist theory would strengthen BE/CSR research, and point to new research directions and agendas arising from our approach. (shrink)

Although corporate social responsibility practice increasingly addresses gender issues, and gender and CSR scholarship is expanding, feminist theory is rarely explicitly referenced or discussed in the CSR literature. We contend that this omission is a key limitation of the field. We argue that CSR theorization and research on gender can be improved through more explicit and systematic reference to feminist theories, and particularly those from feminist organization studies. Addressing this gap, we review developments in feminist organization theory, mapping their relevance (...) to CSR. With reference to six major theoretical perspectives in CSR scholarship, we note feminist research relating to each. Drawing upon FOS theory and CSR theory, we then develop an integrated theoretical framework for the analysis of gender issues in CSR. Our framework enables us to identify research strengths in the gender and CSR literature, as well as gaps therein, to open new conversations and to posit future research directions for this emerging area of scholarship. Our paper illustrates how a better grounding of CSR in feminist theory can contribute to CSR research more broadly. (shrink)

Responding to the Special Issue's call for “new thinking” on gender and governance in developing societies, we introduce our research on the social organization of development knowledge and its ethical implications. Our feminist‐based approach, institutional ethnography, analyses the ruling relations of development and the standpoints represented in knowledge about development and its governance. Our paper offers an alternative to what we see as “the institutional standpoint” prevailing, but taken for granted, in business and society scholarship addressing development. Instead of theorizing (...) development relationships between institutions and their “stakeholders,” we illustrate what can be learned about the social relations of development beginning from the experiences of local subjects. Our analysis of an environmental research and development project in Uzbekistan shows that being missed is knowledge about development subjects that could have revealed what is locally relevant and needed. Instead, we discover gender inequality being constituted, unknowingly, within this project's institutionally generated knowledge and the activities it authorizes. (shrink)