This is the first book in the field of corporate social responsibility to examine the progress of a standard over a ten-year period. Published in late 1997 and revised in 2001, the Social Accountability 8000 (SA8000) standard and verification system is a comprehensive tool aiming to assure humane workplaces throughout the supply chain. The SA8000 system includes: factory-level management system requirements for ongoing compliance and continual improvement; independent, expert verification of compliance by certification bodies; the involvement of all key stakeholders in the SA8000 system; and harnessing consumer and investor concern by helping to identify and support companies that are committed to assuring human rights in the workplace. As of 31 December 2007, nearly 700,000 workers were employed in 1,500 facilities certified to SA8000, in 65 countries and 67 industrial sectors.Ten years on, what has the impact of SA8000 been and how do its architects and users see it developing into the future? In this book, businesses, NGOs, academics and trade union leaders provide much-needed perspective on the lessons learned from SA8000 and set an agenda for the next decade. The book also provides context on the leading initiatives within the field of CSR (such as ISO 26000 and the Business for Social Compliance Initiative) and how they relate to SA8000. The book features case studies on the experiences of a wide range of companies, including Gucci, The GAP, Chiquita, TNT, Tata and Otto Versand, and on many of the most innovative programmes in the field of CSR, such as the Made-By label. Analysts from emerging economies provide valuable insights into how SA8000 has become a key tool in Brazil and India. The book addresses many of the key themes for corporate responsibility such as traceability, supply chain management and transparency.SA8000: The First Decade provides insights for company managers, NGOs, policy-makers and trade union leaders on how to implement a social standard and will be required reading for any manager seeking to implement SA8000 or any other code of conduct or standard for their suppliers.Deborah Leipziger is well known for her book The Corporate Responsibility Code Book, published in 2003 and considered to be one of the key reference books in the field of CSR. SA8000: The First Decade is an extension of Ms Leipziger's work over a 17-year career in the field of CSR, in which she has played a role in the development of many social standards, including SA8000 and the Ethical Trading Initiative, and advised many others.

This volume assesses the achievements and limitations of a new set of non-state or multistakeholder institutions that are concerned with improving the social and environmental record of business, and holding corporations to account. It does so from a perspective that aims to address two limitations that often characterize this field of inquiry. First, fragmentation: articles or books typically focus on one or a handful of cases. Second, the development dimension: what does such regulation imply for developing countries and subaltern groups in terms of well-being, empowerment and sustainability? This volume examines more than 20 initiatives or institutions associated with different regulatory and development approaches, including the business-friendly corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda, ‘corporate accountability’ and ‘fair trade’ or social economy.

This book is a comprehensive reference on ISO management system standards and their implementation. The impacts that ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 have had on business performance are analyzed in depth, and up-to-date perspectives are offered on the integration of these and other management standards (e.g. SA8000, ISO/TS 16949). Detailed information is provided on the signaling value of different management standards and on the new ISO standards for management systems, such as ISO 50001 and ISO 45001, relating to energy management and occupational health and safety. The role of audits in ensuring compliance with the standards and achievement of objectives is also carefully considered. The volume examines avenues for further research and emerging challenges. In offering an integrated, holistic perspective on ISO management system standards, this book will have wide appeal for academics, public decision-makers, and practitioners in the field of quality and environmental management.

The Corporate Responsibility Code Book has become the go-to guide for companies trying to understand the landscape of corporate responsibility and searching for their own, unique route towards satisfying diverse stakeholders. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. A company may face quite different challenges if it operates in more than one part of the world. And yet stakeholders, especially consumers and investors, are keen for some degree of comparability with which they can evaluate corporate performance. There are countervailing forces at work within corporate responsibility: on the one hand is the need for convergence in order to simplify the large numbers of codes and standards; and, on the other hand, the need to foster diversity and innovation. Many of the best codes of conduct and standards are not well known, while some CR instruments that are well disseminated are not terribly effective. Some comprehensive codes of conduct achieve nothing, while other quite vague codes of conduct become well embedded into the organization and foster innovation and change. This landmark book explains the best CR instruments available, and distils their most valuable elements. In the fully revised third edition, Deborah Leipziger widens her lens to provide detailedanalysis of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Gender EqualityPrinciples and ISO 26000 while updating other key tools such as the Equator Principles, the OECD guidelines and GRI’s new G4 framework. The codes in this book cover a wide range of issues, including human rights, labour rights,environmental management, corruption and corporate governance. The book also includeshow-to (or process) codes focusing on reporting, stakeholder engagement and assurance.

The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting. Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and Library / The Business History Conference Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement, the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.

This book examines the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Latin America, with a particular focus on Brazil. Drawing on historical developments and theoretical reflections alike, it introduces readers to the state of the art in Brazilian CSR. The authors present a range of regulatory and entrepreneurial frameworks that form the basis for business and CSR activities in Brazil. In a number of detailed case studies from various Brazilian institutions and enterprises, the book provides revealing insights into the practice of sustainable and responsible business conduct in this country. Subsequent chapters show the effects of anti-corruption laws, which have since informed corporations’ compliance agendas, and discuss recent, massive corruption scandals. Generally speaking, the book provides a highly informative and practice-oriented resource that successfully reconciles an ostensible contradiction – corporate social responsibility and Brazil.

When we speak of global governance today, we no longer mean simply state-to-state diplomacy, international treaties, or intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. Alongside these ‘traditional' elements of global politics are a host of new institutions ranging from global networks of governmental officials, to private codes of conduct for corporations, to action-oriented partnerships of NGOs, governments, corporations, and other actors. These innovative mechanisms offer intriguing solutions to pressing transnational challenges as diverse as climate change, financial governance, workers' rights, and public health. But they also raise new questions about the effectiveness and legitimacy of transnational governance. An expanding body of scholarship has sought to identify and assess these new forms of governance, but this young body of work has lacked a sense of the larger picture. This volume seeks to fill that need by presenting a comprehensive overview of new forms of transnational governance. This resource is essential for those who want to explain why transborder governance has changed and to understand what implications these changes have for global politics.

The Nordic Swan is a voluntary environmental and consumer policy instrument that was launched in the Nordic countries in 1989. This study has its origin in the discussions on the making of the “Vision 2015” for the Nordic Swan as well as in a growing need to find structured methods to account for what the ecolabel does. The study has the overall purpose to highlight the experiences of using indicators for reporting, which actors that should be targeted and their need of information, and also to propose a set of indicators applicable specifically for the Nordic Swan. It is proposed in the report that the Nordic Swan scheme prioritizes developing indicators to track changes in internal performance and efficiency. The project was financed by the Nordic Council of Environmental Ministers´ (NCM) working group for sustainable consumption and production (HKP-gruppen).

This book explores recent developments in the theory, strategic perspective and international practice of corporate social responsibility. In particular it discusses the consequences of the economic slowdown apparent in many economies and the impact of changes in the regulatory environment. It consists of three parts: Part one addresses a variety of theoretical approaches as well as the dynamics and criticism of corporate social responsibility. It takes into account social and governmental expectations for the new and extended role of companies in the economy and in society, and provides a new context and theoretical assumptions regarding the functions and tasks of corporate social responsibility. Part two discusses the practical aspects relating to strategic management and corporate governance, corporate disclosure and reporting, as well as the empowerment of stakeholders. Lastly, part three focuses on the international practice of corporate social responsibility in various organizational and institutional settings. Using numerous case studies, the book explores the challenges and tasks of CSR in emerging markets, in the fashion industry and in global and family companies. It identifies the changes that can be detected following the financial crisis, closing the loop and linking the empirical findings with the revised theoretical framework.

'Political science has leap-frogged law, economics, and sociology to become the dominant discipline contributing to regulatory studies. David Levi-Faur's volume taps the rich veins of regulatory scholarship that have made this the case. It brings together the talented new network of politics scholars intrigued by the importance of the changing nature of state and non-state regulation. Their fresh insights complement important new work by established stars of the field. Definitely a book to have on your shelf when in search of exciting theoretical approaches to politics.' – John Braithwaite, Australian National University '"Regulation", in its manifold forms, is the central process of contemporary governance, as it seeks to blend the dynamism of market economies with responsiveness to political and normative demands for health, safety, environmental protection, and fairness. Understanding regulation's varieties, vulnerabilities, and virtues has become a significant focus of academic research and theory. This volume provides an extraordinary survey of research in that field – a survey remarkable in its comprehensiveness, outstanding in the quality of the contributions by leading regulatory scholars from different nations and academic disciplines.' – Robert A. Kagan, University of California, Berkeley, US 'An authoritative collection by a range of contributors with outstanding reputations in the field.' – Michael Moran, WJM Mackenzie Professor of Government 'This is an extraordinarily useful one-stop-shop for a wide range of traditions and approaches to the political aspects of regulation. David Levi-Faur has assembled a fine collection that by reporting on the state of the art also shows the way ahead for a discipline that has to capture and explain dramatic changes in real-world regulatory philosophies and policies.' – Claudio Radaelli, University of Exeter, UK 'This is an unusually impressive edited volume. Its contributors include the leading academic experts on government regulation from around the world. Its several clearly-written and informative essays address the most important topics, issues, and debates that have engaged students of regulatory politics. I strongly recommend this volume to anyone interested in understanding the breadth and depth of contemporary scholarship on the political dimensions of regulation.' – David Vogel, University of California, Berkeley, US This unique Handbook offers the most up-to-date and comprehensive, state-of-the-art reviews of the politics of regulation. It presents and discusses the core theories and concepts of regulation in response to the rise of the regulatory state and regulatory capitalism, and in the context of the 'golden age of regulation'. Its ten sections include forty-nine chapters covering issues as diverse and varied as: theories of regulation; historical perspectives on regulation; regulation of old and new media; risk regulation, enforcement and compliance; better regulation; civil regulation; European regulatory governance; and global regulation. As a whole, it provides an essential point of reference for all those working on the political, social, and economic aspects of regulation. This comprehensive resource will be of immense value to scholars and policymakers in numerous fields and disciplines including political science, public policy and administration, international relations, regulation, international law, business and politics, European studies, regional studies, and development studies.