Multi-stakeholder initiatives involve actors from several spheres of society (market, civil society and state) in collaborative arrangements to reach objectives typically related to sustainable development. In political CSR literature, these arrangements have been framed as improvements to transnational governance and as being somehow democratic. We draw on Mouffe's works on agonistic pluralism to problematize the notion that consensus-led multi-stakeholder initiatives bring more democratic control on corporate power. We examine two initiatives which address two very different issue areas: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety (The Accord). We map the different kinds of adversarial relations involved in connection with the issues meant to be governed by the two initiatives, and find those adversarial relations to take six main shapes, affecting the initiatives in different ways: (1) competing regulatory initiatives;(2) pressure-response relations within multi-stakeholder initiatives; (3) pressure-response relations between NGOs and states through multi-stakeholder initiatives; (4) collaboration and competition between multi-stakeholder initiatives and states; (5) pressure-response relations between civil society actors and multi-stakeholder initiatives; and (6) counter-hegemonic movements against multi-stakeholder initiatives as hegemonic projects. We conclude that multi-stakeholder initiatives cannot be democratic by themselves, and we argue that business and society researchers should not look at democracy or politics only internally to these initiatives, but rather study how issue areas are regulated through interactions between a variety of actors-both within and without the multi-stakeholder initiatives-who get to have a legitimate voice in this regulation.

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In this paper we conduct a critical reading of the European Union's social innovation policy (EUSIP) discourse. We argue that, rather than being a transformative discourse within EU policy, EUSIP discourse reinforces neoliberal hegemony by (re)legitimizing it. Inspired by post-foundational discourse theory and Glynos and Howarth's logics of critical explanation we analyse three central EUSIP documents. We characterize what kind of political project is articulated in and through EUSIP discourse, and uncover how it relates to neoliberal political rationality. Our contribution lies in showing: (1) how the social logics of EUSIP can be understood as both 'roll-out' and 'roll-with-it' neoliberalization, thereby relegitimizing and naturalizing neoliberalism; (2) how the political logics of EUSIP pre-empt the critique of 'roll-back' neoliberalization and thus legitimize decreased public expenditure; and (3) how the fantasmatic logics make EUSIP ideologically useful in relegitimizing neoliberalism through the win-win-win fantasy and the ethical responsibilization of subjects. We argue that resisting the neoliberalizing power of EUSIP discourse implies resisting the fantasmatic grip Post-print version Organization, 2017, Vol. 24(6) driven by a replication of best practices, we need to understand SIs as conceived and suited for particular social issues in particular contexts: we call for a different win-win mindset that does not blind innovators to possible negative impacts of SIs.

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In this article, we draw on a postcolonial sensibility to deconstruct how culture is discussed in mainstream international business textbooks. Through this deconstruction we show: (1) how the initial disclaimers that call for cultural sensitivity can be seen as pointing to the opposite of what they claim, which leads us to question the cultural sensitivity notion from ethical and political standpoints; (2) how the cultural dichotomies that form the core of the discussions always tend to silence the suppressed 'other' features on each side, which leads us to point to the much more ambivalent nature of culture and the hybrid spaces that can be created through cultural translation; (3) how (colonial) history is conspicuously absent from the arguments about 'cultural' underdevelopment and thus haunts the text. We conclude the article by suggesting the development of alternative types of international business textbook material on culture.