| Review of: | International business-society management: Linking corporate responsibility and globalization by Rob van Tulder, Alex van der Zwart |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Jan Kooiman, Professor Emeritus |
| Reviewed in: | Public Administration |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 85, Issue 03, Pages 857-883 |
Reviews
This book is in the first place a textbook connecting disciplinary fields as diverse as International Business, Business-Society Management, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Public Relations, and Political Economy. So the reader may wonder why it should be reviewed in this Journal. However, in the opinion of this reviewer, the book, with its prime roots in international business, business-society management and business ethics, international political economy and economic geography, is more than a textbook for students and others interested in those fields in the literal sense. Although this reviewer personally has been involved in the above mentioned subjects hardly at all, I learned more about issues, ideas, insights and facts on the intersections of market, civil society and the state (the societal institutions businesses are embedded in) than in many a publication devoted to those institutions and their inter-relations themselves.
The book consists of three major parts: the first on the status and developments of those three societal institutions; the second on the social responsibilities of (in particular international) companies and finally a third dealing first with cases and then offering prospective views on how to deal with the manifold dilemmas surrounding globalization and corporate responsibilities. A web site accompanying the book (http://www.ib-sm.org) provides a wealth of other cases and dossiers that further support the statements and deepen the scientific background of the book.
The first part of the book deals with international societal relations and developments on the basis of the concept of rivalry. This concept is linked to outcomes of interactions to construct four interaction types: race, contest, co-alignment and co-habitation. These concepts are used in the second part of the book to assess the outcome of the rivalry that is considered a major force in present-day societal trends: rival institutions, rival models, rival trends in business, civil society and the state, rivalry in the international bargaining society and managing rivalry at societal interfaces.
These first seven chapters of the book are of prime interest to readers of this Journal. Developments within and between (inter)national companies, governments and NGO's at the institutional and at the organizational level are discussed and illustrated. The authors deal with major trends in international business; for example, discussing and summarizing subjects such as rise of Multinational Corporations, mergers and market concentrations: in short the role of modern business in a globalized world. In the same way, they discuss the transformation of the modern state. They describe factors not only contributing to its retreat, but also re-regulation and re-privatization, appraising these and other trends. Is the modern state really receding as so many want us to believe or is there a re-configuration taking place with a trade-off between all kinds of 'isms' - in particular in the international scene in which business-society management is restructured at different levels? In the same vein, rivalry in terms of the international bargaining society and the challenge of societal interface management are systematically discussed and all these trends are systematically analysed at various levels (local, national, regional, global) and illustrated with numerous insightful and well constructed tables, boxes and figures - as in the book as a whole.
The book, however, offers more in the form of its discussion in Part II of International Corporate Social Responsibility. For those uninitiated in the ins and outs of business ethics, corporate social responsibility, reputation analysis, issue management, public affairs and all those other expressions of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the book provides interesting and non-ideological reading. The popular debate is often said to move between the insights of Milton Friedman one the one hand (responsibility is to make profit) and Anita Roddick of The Body Shop (responsibility is about public good, and not private greed) on the other hand. But this book makes clear that although this debate is very intense, it is 'not wholly insightful' (p. 131). Part II of the book therefore offers a systematic and well-documented overview of all those aspects of international business and its - basically - public responsibilities as they are formulated by scholars and practitioners of today, and taught to the managers of tomorrow.
Finally, the last part of the book: 'The International Bargaining Society in Action', consists of a number of much talked-about cases: Nike, Shell, Triumph, GlaxoSmithKline and ExxonMobil. These offer interesting reading, showing the many-faceted ideas of CSR in practice. The final chapter argues that the nature of the interaction between civil society, firms and the state is burdened with conflicts, although cooperation and dialogue seem more appropriate means to establish new societal arrangements. The illustrative cases show that confrontation hardly ever leads to effective solutions, with the concluding chapter offering an interesting way out of these dilemmas in the form of a 'strategic stakeholder dialogue', which is presented as a new form of social contract.
Interestingly, the book does not speak directly about governance. Instead, the challenge of governance becomes translated into the challenge of 'corporate governance' and the institutional void linked to the bargaining society that necessitates all sorts of new arrangements on the interface between public and private. Yet in this sense the book deals directly with major governance issues in the modern world, those which anyone interested in working with state, market and civil society and their interrelations, in other words with governance in all its modalities, would do well to take notice of.