Title:
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In Good Company An Ethnography of Corporate Social Responsibility
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This thesis is concerned with the discourse and practice of corporate social responsibility
(CSR). Through a multi-sited ethnography of the world's third biggest mining company
(Anglo American PIc) the thesis traces the trans-local aspects of a transnational mining
corporation in pursuit of the slippety notion of CSR- a movement devoted to harnessing
the g/cl;d reach and resources of 1NCs in the service of kx:al development and social
improvement. The ethnography tracks these processes across a geographically diverse
set of sites, from the corporate boardrooms of the companys headquarters, and the
broader 'global' arenas of CSR in which the company is engaged, in London; to their
headquaners in Johannesburg and those of their subsidiaty (Anglo Platinum); and
ultimately to the toWIl of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa's platinum belt. As
such, the company provides a lens through which to reflect on the wider global CSR
movement. The aims of this thesis are twofold. Firstly, the goal of this research is to
contribute an understanding of the way in which c01porations, as architects and agents of
development, generate new kinds of relationships between the private sector, the state
and civil society. In bringing ethnographic approaches to bear on corporate capitalism, I
examine haw power is accumulated and exercised in ethical regimes such as 'corporate
responsibilitY, and in the discursive practices to which they give rise. The ethnographic
study of CSR aims to shed light on these new regimes of authority and the ways in which
they are authenticated and naturalised through the appeal to a moral discourse of
responsibility. In so doing, this research aims, secondly, to advance anthropological
debates on the relationship between, on the one hand the s.upposed amorality of 'the
Market' and, on the other, the discourse of morality.
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