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Title:
Corporate Agendas and Ground-Realities: A Transnational
Perspective on Indian Workers and Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR)
Where
& When: February 26, 2008
341 Eggers Hall
12.30 pm
Type
of Activity: Speaker
Speaking: Payal
Banerjee and Kasturi Gupta, Department of Sociology,
Syracuse University
Summary:
This presentation focuses on the complexities and
contradictions within Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
arising as a result of CSR’s implementation within a
neoliberal framework and provides an empirically-based
assessment of the following: 1) a critical review of the
relevance of CSR initiatives on employees of large-scale
manufacturing companies; and 2) an analysis of flexible
hiring and consequent marginalization of Indian immigrant
information technology (IT) worker in the U.S. as a
subcontracted workforce and their exclusion from CSR agendas
despite their work at many CSR-member corporations. Both the
IT and manufacturing sectors, as identified above, have been
key contributors to India’s recent economic growth.
Moreover, companies in both sectors work closely with the
state (such as, the IT industry in the U.S. and India shapes
work visa policies, likewise the manufacturing sector in
India influences policies on industrialization,
privatization, and labor laws). Therefore, it becomes
incumbent to study how workers in these sectors, central to
the development process, are faring in terms of their social
and economic indicators.
The increasing popularization of the CSR
ideology/practices changes the terms in which the third
world is being folded into transnational capitalism. Instead
of seeing themselves as subjects/objects, people are now
encouraged to view themselves as agents of the economic
outcomes surrounding them, i.e., dominance is being recast
as hegemony. Yet, as this essay shows, the fundamental
hierarchies of power have remained the same. Hence, third
world workers are still being incorporated into global
capitalism in deeply unequal, exploitative, and
disenfranchising manner. This time however, the ideology and
practice of CSR gives the impression that all of this is
‘participatory’, ‘ground-up’, and in some sense,
‘democratic’.
Sponsorship:
The South Asia Center
