1. Contemporary Slavery as More Than Rhetorical Strategy? The Politics and Ideology of A New Political Cause

Modern Slavery in Business: The Sad and Sorry State of a Non-Field

“…Fourth, like business scholars, political scientists are interested in the power, legitimacy, and accountability of nonstate actors—including industry actors and civil society organizations—within the modern slavery governance arena. This strand of research includes analysis of the politics and power of antislavery and antitrafficking NGOs (Bunting & Quirk, 2017; O’Connell Davidson, 2015), corporations and industry associations (LeBaron & Rühmkorf, 2017), multistakeholder initiatives (Fransen, 2012), and auditing and accounting firms, including the Big 4 (Fransen & LeBaron, 2019).…”

“…However, some scholars and activists reject the term modern slavery, seeing it as a nebulous, poorly and inconsistently defined catch-all term with little explanatory power. They note that those who use this term frequently misrepresent the nature of the problem of severe labor exploitation (Beutin, 2019; LeBaron, 2018; O’Connell Davidson, 2015) and may even unwittingly reinforce the problems they claim to challenge (Bunting & Quirk, 2017; Shih, 2015).…”

Bringing the problem home: The anti-slavery and anti-trafficking rhetoric of UK non-government organisations

“…In the past, antislavery campaigners themselves attained something like celebrity status, famed for their passionate oratory and ability to inspire an audience to compassion for African slaves (Morgan, 2013;Turley, 1991). By normalising rhetoric, we take a different approach from scholars who separate rhetoric from anti-slavery practice (Bunting and Quirk, 2017). We argue that rhetoric is an appropriate dimension of political practice, intersecting the framing of problems and relational political dynamics in regard to them.…”

“…Given the contingency of meaning surrounding the concept of exploitation, a political dynamic is ever-present regarding problem definition. Discourse about the global estimates and extent of exploitation has been described as 'hyperbolic' (Weitzer, 2015: 239) and 'rhetoric' (Bunting and Quirk, 2017;O'Connell Davidson, 2010: 252;Sharma, 2005). Due to this indeterminacy, discourse is far from a simple matter of reporting on events.…”

Book Review Symposium: Siddharth KaraModern Slavery: A Global Perspective

“…Kara is representative of a genre of writing on modern slavery that has been extensively criticized from a range of perspectives that come under the umbrella label of “beyond trafficking and slavery” (Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, 2017), in which the modern slavery agenda is seen as “sensationalist, self-serving, and superficial” (Bunting & Quirk, 2017, p. 28). Nevertheless, for all that Kara’s research might have shortcomings as social science, at least in its presentation and selective account of the relevant literature, it represents a challenge for a critical perspective in organization studies.…”