Product Description

Making responsible social and environmental choices has not always been a first priority for many corporations, but recent history has changed all that. Small but mighty nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), using twenty-first-century global communications, are nipping at the heels of corporations caught in unethical and irresponsible practices.

NGO “market campaigns” are moving these companies toward the higher standard now demanded by their clients, their consumers, and society as a whole. The lever that moves these giants is the risk of destroying their carefully built “brands” if they fail to recognize their “moral liability” and clean up their practices.

Branded! outlines the ability of NGOs to affect corporate markets. It shows how the development of certification systems for corporate social and environmental practices has created some intriguing questions:

• Why are retail giants paying premiums for ethically produced products . . . and not overcharging their customers?
• How have NGOs gained such power and credibility?
• What are the challenges of these new modes of corporate accountability for both NGOs and corporations?
• What are the unexpected opportunities for newly accountable corporations?

Branded! is a must-read for corporate executives, NGOs, and ethically concerned consumers. It is rich with vignettes of firms, NGOs, campaigns, failures, successes, memorable personalities, and hard-fought battles.

 

Dr. Michael E. Conroy is an economist who taught for twenty-five years at the University of Texas. He has spent twelve years in various philanthropic positions in support of certification systems and serves on the boards of several key organizations in the certification field.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #656984 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Michael Conroy is Program Officer for Global Governance for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Previously a Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, he was also Senior Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, and Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Customer Reviews

A new brand of optimism for globalization
How many books do you know of that are critical of the way economic globalization is going but that also glow with optimism about the future? Rather than yet another treatise on how multinational corporations are hijacking the globalization process to the advantage of the few, this book shows how global corporate reach is exactly what is making multinationals more vulnerable and easier to change. As global firms spread the globe they increasingly compete on their "brand." Once they get big they come under the scrutiny of a growing global advocacy community that investigates the social and environmental practices of these firms from the retail shop to the sweatshop and then threatens (and often delivers) to slander the very brands that give these firms legs.
More and more global firms fear this and are slowly becoming pro-active in seeking third party certifications for their practices. Such alternative branding gives the firm a literal "stamp of approval" by global civil society, makes producer and consumer alike feel better about production and consumption decisions, and betters the bottom line for producers and their suppliers. Conroy demonstrates how this has happened in coffee, timber, and fisheries markets and is beginning to take hold in mining, flowers and elsewhere.

This is by far the most comprehensive work on the "fair trade movement" thus far. Its actually a few books in one. First, it documents how global social movements are evolving in the 21st century. Rather than being simply protest oriented in campaigns to stop corporations in their tracks the certification movement channels firms toward a more sustainable alternative. Second, the volume is a global economic analysis of the political economy of fair trade, showing that the principles of consumer information can be in sync with neo-classical economics and improve firms bottom lines. Finally, it is an insider memoir of a movement that few have the access to the archival and anecdotal evidence of its breadth and detail. Mike Conroy shows that another globalization is not only possible, it is happening.