Corporate social responsibility through global value chains : behaviour of lead companies and new dynamics of industrial relations

This paper reviews the behaviour of multinational companies across global value chains. The production and exchange of a final or intermediate product is no longer limited to a simple transaction in nation-state. There are at least five forms of global value chains (market; captive; hierarchical and relational). These new business models minimized the marginal cost of production for many multinational companies. However, with the pressure of a hyper-competitive global production regime and its iron triangle (price, quality, and flexibility), the different transactions were often accompanying by inadequate labor conditions across the intermediate links. Thus, the traditional regime of labor regulation has given way to new coercive and normative mechanisms often labelled under corporate social responsibility initiatives. Based on a literature search, this article is written from a critical perspective and advances a new theoretical approach. The behaviour of a multinational company varies according to the nature of institutional arrangements in its home country. Our approach is based on the French theory of regulation and the American theory of strategic choice. Our analysis shows that labor regulation instruments seem increasingly decentralized in countries with family capitalism and countries with social-democratic capitalism. However, they frequently centralized in countries with a capitalism dominated by markets and finance. This new cartography makes an interpretative break with previous developments that do not consider the institutional context in the analysis of the form of governance of global value chains.