Transnational Corporations and Social Movement Organizations
Conflicts between TNCs and social movement organizations raise two important issues. First, they demonstrate that an increasingly transnational arena of public contestation and debate has gained relevance for the acceptance and legitimacy of business decisions. Within this arena, which may be regarded as an emerging 'transnational civil society', the legitimacy of decisions cannot be secured by the mechanisms of formal state politics alone. Rather it becomes a matter of 'transnational subpolitics', i.e. informal politics between transnational non-state actors. Second, conflicts between TNCs and protest groups are examples of the clash of diverging rationalities in a modern, differentiated society. They pit economic rationality against environmental concern and thus provide a testing ground for social processes that may be able to resolve such conflicts.
Publications
- Holzer, Boris (2013): Inadvertent citizens: corporate citizenship and moral actorhood. In: Karin Svedberg Helgesson und Ulrika Mörth (Hg.): The Political Role of Corporate Citizens. An Interdisciplinary Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, S. 65-83.
- Holzer, Boris (2010): Moralizing the Corporation: Transnational Activism and Corporate Accountability, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
- Holzer, Boris (2008): Organisierte Globalität: Vernetzung, Entgrenzung und Institutionalisierung transnationaler Unternehmen, in Andrea Maurer and Uwe Schimank (Hg.), Die Gesellschaft der Unternehmen - Die Unternehmen der Gesellschaft, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, S. 265-276.
- Holzer, Boris (2007): Framing the corporation: Royal Dutch/Shell and human rights woes in Nigeria, Journal of Consumer Policy, 30 (3, Special Issue on Shopping for Human Rights), 281-301.