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Multinationals & Globalization: Friends Or Foes?

Research Proposal

Multinationals & Globalization: Friends or foes?

Supervisor Annelies de Kleijn

Names Wietske van der Knaap 294689
Gabriëlle Boer 298637
Isabelle Coppens 297950

Team Team 3

Date 08-11-2007

Table of contents

1. Introduction 2
2. Literature review 3
2.1 Corporate Social Responsibility 4
2.2 Content of codes of conduct 4
2.3 Codes of conduct of Non Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) 5
2.4 Corporate codes of conduct 6
2.5 Child labour 7
2.6 Codes of conduct and child labour 8
3. Problem definition & Research questions 9
4. Theory and propositions 10
4.1 Evaluation of propositions 10
4.2 Definition of concepts 11
4.3 Conceptual model 12
5. Data and methodology 14
5.1 Research strategy 14
6. Timeframe 15
7. Executive Summary 16
8. References 18

1. Introduction

The ethics of business are becoming more and more important for Multinational Enterprises (Pedersen and Andersen, 2006). It is no longer all about making profit. MNE’s find themselves under a larger amount of social pressure. They have to meet needs of not only employees, but also NGO’s and other interest groups. In response to the increasing societal pressure, many companies adapt the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by introducing codes of conduct that are expected to ensure socially responsible business practices throughout the chain – from supplier of raw materials to final end-users (Pedersen and Andersen, 2006).

Codes of conduct are discussed for some years now, but still there are no clearly defined recommendations on what a good code should include to be effective. Furthermore, different parties can be involved in establishing codes like governments, business associations or NGO’s. These players in the field of codes of conduct all have their own ideas of what a code should include, how it has to be implemented or monitored. NGO’s are expected to establish effective codes of conduct, but in practice non...