Conference Programme
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available). Note that the schedule is subject to changes.
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Parallel Session 12: Corporate Responses to Societal Pressures Location: Seminar Room 7 (Level 2) Session Chair: Judith Walls, University of St.Gallen | |
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Social Investments and the Commodification of Community Conflict University of Oxford, United Kingdom This paper resolves a puzzle in research intersecting nonmarket strategy and social movements: that social investments to local communities can avoid community conflict by alleviating grievances while they can also cause conflict by stimulating opportunistic behavior to exploit firms. Based on nine months of fieldwork in Peru’s mining industry, this paper examines how one of the world’s largest mining firms sought to manage violent community conflict through social investments. The analysis shows how social investments commodified grievances and turned the community’s use of violent conflict into a calculated transaction, in exchange for social investments. Over time, violent conflict became normalized as an “everyday” activity, rendering the use of social investments to quell conflict ineffective. The findings matter for theory and practice: social investments can fundamentally transform firm-community relations, beyond reducing grievances or stimulating opportunism, in ways that can institutionalize violent community conflict. | |