My research centers on the ethical relationship between business and society. My first project was an ethnographic study of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) industry that is creating and installing voluntary social and environmental codes of conduct and practices among corporations. In a...
My research centers on the ethical relationship between business and society. My first project was an ethnographic study of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) industry that is creating and installing voluntary social and environmental codes of conduct and practices among corporations. In adopting CSR, corporations internalize and set to new purposes ethical discourses derived from activists and the development industry (e.g. transparency, accountability, good governance, participation, empowerment, and environmentalism). Based on fieldwork in the U.S. headquarters of Newmont Mining Corporation and around the Batu Hijau copper and gold mine on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, the project examines the competing ways in which corporate managers, Sumbawan village residents, NGOs, and government officials construe and negotiate the social responsibilities of a mining corporation.