Guest editorial

Abstract

Guest editorialDo CSR management control systems walk the talk? From Bhopal to Rana Plaza, 30 years of CSR practices Rana Plaza disaster: what lessons can be learned over the past 30 years of corporate social responsibility management practices?The collapse of the Rana Plaza building of 2013 was the last disaster that caught the media's and academics' attention out of a long list of disasters that happened in the past decades. As the explosion of the Union Carbide factory at Bhopal in India in December 1984, to limit ourselves to industrial globalization in developing countries, many catastrophes happened in developing countries as a consequence of the increase of the wave of delocalization of industrial factories from well-regulated developed countries into weakly regulated developing countries. These catastrophes are reminiscent of older industrial catastrophes that paved the way of the history of industrial capitalist development, in developed countries in the 19th and 20th centuries (Aggeri and Godard, 2006). The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 in New York, caused the death of 146 people and dozens of injured, generating important media coverage and popular protest when the macabre circumstances were described by the press, with the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks. The fire led to stricter legislation and changes in safety prevention standards and participated to develop labor unionism (Drehle, 2004).Similar catastrophes in developing countries' factories most of the time [1] did not result in stricter legislation or strengthening of labor unionism but in the development of private mechanisms of corporate social responsibility (CSR).The different coalitions of NGOs, industrials, governments and labor unions formed after each catastrophe or scandal in the 1990s, resulting in the form of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) or private mechanisms of CSR. As explained by Bartley (2003), these practices were favored by the neoliberal institutional context, favoring private mechanisms considered as more efficient and cheaper for public finance than public intervention. These CSR practices, such as private mechanisms of certification, extra-financial reporting or management capacity building, were developed only after the coalition failed two previous attempts. They first failed to implement stricter importation policies in developed countries, banning goods involved in social and environmental dumping as in the case of Austria in 1992 because of the GATT considering social and environmental norms as barriers to trade. They then failed to convince producing countries such as Indonesia to strengthen their own legislation like protecting their forest, a request that Europeans did not apply to their own forest during their industrial development as duly noted by the Indonesian Government.Thus, CSR can be viewed as a disputed concept (Brabet, 2010(Brabet, , 2011 for which multiple stakeholders struggle and collaborate. As such, its definition depends o...