Social movements and corporations in the global South

Panel at the European Sociological Association Conference, Prague, 25-28 August 2015

The panel is part of the Social movement research network session, with many other movement related panels. More information on all the panels and on how to submit a paper here http://www.esa12thconference.eu/rn25-social-movements

Social movements and corporations in the global South

Chairs

Philip Balsiger, Graduate Center, City University New York, philip.balsiger@gmail.com

Maria-Therese Gustaffson, Stockholm University, maria-therese.gustafsson@statsvet.su.se

Corporations are powerful players in a world of deregulation and economic globalization. In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in studying interactions between social movements and corporations. So far, this literature has overwhelmingly focused on activists opposing corporations in Western countries. Yet many conflicts between corporations and social movement organizations or civil society groups take place in the ‘global South’. While scholars from a variety of disciplines do study such conflicts, they are rarely linked to the debates raised within the Western-centric study of movement-corporate interactions. In producing countries conditions differ in important ways: conflicts take place further down in the supply chains, the inequality of resources between activist challengers and companies is likely to be higher, political-institutional contexts vary greatly. For this panel we welcome empirical studies that address the following questions: How does corporations’ involvement in social service provision and/or the relationship between the state and corporations affect the relationship between corporations and movements? How are movement-corporate interactions related to the global inequalities of capitalism and reflected in in framing processes? How do the complex relationships between transnational advocacy groups and national/local organizations shape movement-corporate interactions? And how, on the opposite side, does the integration of firms in global supply chains constrain corporate responses? By addressing these issues the panel seeks to cross-fertilize studies on Western and non-Western contexts and contribute to develop the theoretical frameworks used to analyze interactions between movements and corporations.