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Corporate Social Responsibility and Labour Standards:

Bridging Private Governance, Industrial Relations and Management Perspectives

Call for Papers

Conference and Special Issue

Special Issue Editors 

Lucio Baccaro (Université de Genève)
Virginia Doellgast (London School of Economics)

Gregory Jackson (Freie Universität Berlin)

Aims and Scope

The conference and special issue of British Journal of Industrial Relations is dedicated to the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and labour standards.  CSR is treated as an emerging new regulatory regime for addressing labour and other standards, which interacts in complex fashion with state and international regulations and with traditional industrial relations practices. The goal is to reach a deeper and dispassionate understanding of why CSR policies emerge, how they function and what kind of concrete results they achieve, as well as of the newly emerging policy mix in the field of labour standards. We aim to encourage dialogue between various research streams around these issues, including the management and international business scholarship on CSR, the sociology and political science literatures on private governance across global supply chains and development of multilevel regulatory regimes in the field of labour regulation, and scholarship grounded in the traditions of labour and industrial relations. 

The following is a list of indicative, but not exhaustive, topic areas at the intersection of different fields. We would prefer empirically-oriented scholarship but broad think-pieces such as overviews and critiques will also be considered provided they open up new perspectives on the issues at stake.

-          Organized labour and CSR: friends or foes? 

-          CSR as a regulatory complement or a substitute for legislative and contractual regulation;

-          Corporate irresponsibility and its reputational consequences;

-          Relationships between CSR and other corporate policies (HRM, quality control, etc.);

-          International labour standards and other dimensions of CSR.

Key Dates

Conference: 

Please submit an extended abstract of 2000 words or a complete paper to the BJIR by November 1, 2014 via email to Bjir.Office@lse.ac.uk.  A selection of these will be invited to present their paper at a conference to be held at the London School of Economics and Political Science in April 2015.

Special issue:

Submissions to the special issue of the BJIR must be submitted no later than June 30, 2015.  Papers will be published in the Wiley Early View on line system, and will appear in a special issue of the journal at a later date (to be determined).

We encourage authors to submit their papers to the conference prior to submitting them to the special issue.  However, it is possible to submit to the special issue without participating in the conference.  All papers for the special issue will undergo double-blind peer review without guarantee of final acceptance.

If you have any further questions, please contact the BJIR office (Bjir.Office@lse.ac.uk).