Niklas Egels-Zandén

Senior lecturer
Center for Business in Society
P.O. Box 600
SE 405 30 Gothenburg
Viktoriagatan 10
+46 31 786 2729
Niklas.Zanden@handels.gu.se

My research is part of the research at the Centre for Business in Society into the role of corporations in society. In focus are concepts such as Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability, and more importantly the corporate practices captured in these concepts. My four main research areas are described below. Parts from all these research areas are currently used in my PhD study that focuses on transnational corporations¿ operations in China.

Transnational corporations in controversial markets
Transnational corporations operate in markets with different institutional environments. This project analyses TNCs¿ practices in markets with extreme institutional differences (in terms of CSR aspects). Empirically, this is currently done in relation to a Nordic TNCs operation in China. In focus are tensions between universal corporate policies (as for example related to the UN Global Compact) and local institutional environments and stakeholder demands.

Transnational governance of workers¿ rights
Governance of workers¿ rights has traditionally been handled through national collective bargaining and industrial agreements between firms and unions, with various degrees of government intervention across different countries. Currently, both the national foundation and the tripartite actor structure in industrial relations are challenged in what some describe as an era of radical institutional innovations in industrial relations. Transnational industrial relations governance systems are emerging to complement, and potentially substitute, national systems, and new actors (most notably NGOs) are emerging as influential workers¿ rights representatives. This project studies among other things: i) labour unions¿ transnational strategies in response to these challenges, ii) the entrance of NGOs into industrial relations, iii) the union-NGO relation, and iv) the codes of conduct versus international framework agreements tension.

Adding values to CSR
CSR activities are frequently described as adding value to corporations. In this project, focus is shifted to how corporations, NGOs, unions and other actors add values to CSR. Why do certain and not other definitions of CSR emerge in practice? What actors are ¿ and what actors are not ¿ involved in the processes of defining CSR, and how can we understand these practitioner developed definitions of CSR? These questions are mainly studied using two different approaches. First, I study longitudinal processes where actors are attempting to define what CSR will mean in practice. Second, to understand what these practitioner definitions of CSR mean, I link these definitions to overarching theoretical frameworks such as the Enlightenment tradition, feministic reasoning and post-colonial theories.

A theory of the moral boundaries of the firm
Transnational corporations have come to extend their boundaries of responsibility to ¿ in addition to their internal operations ¿ also include their suppliers¿ operations. This project studies the processes leading to expansions of TNCs¿ responsibilities and the creation and implementation of systems that operationalize these responsibilities. This includes all from firm-stakeholder macro-discussions on supplier responsibilities to detailed studies in to, for example, risk models for supplier selection and choices of monitoring systems. The initial focus in this project has been on supplier responsibility, but it has recently been expanded as to develop a theory of the moral boundaries of the firm.