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Title 'Re-imagining Africa's untapped treasure': discursive practices of corporate social responsibility in Sudan
Full text https://dspace.library.uu.nl:8080/handle/1874/393223
Date 2019
Author(s) Meiners, M.
Contributor(s) Kruijf, de, H.; Bryant, R.
Abstract The private sector is increasingly put centre-stage in international development policies to find innovative and sustainable solutions to enduring humanitarian and economic crises. On this wave, a growing number of Sudanese ventures adopt a discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This research explores the manifestation of this global CSR discourse in Sudan and aims to understand how Sudanese business actors interact with this discourse. It discusses four elements of discursive practices around: partnerships, events, space, and language. This ethnographic analysis evolves along the lines of two divergent type of businesses that play significant role in Sudan as CSR actors: large diversified family corporations and the social impact hubs. It takes a critical stance towards the blind enthusiasm for collaboration between different fields under the banner of CSR and reveals the underlying processes. It argues that the CSR discourse brings along inherent discursive practices that exclude alternative views or arrangements, dismiss the need for a deep local understanding of the values it promotes, and tend to circle through higher class arenas where CSR in itself generates the new case for business. Additionally, the discursive practices create unequal partnerships among international donors and local business actors, who are supposed to voice the 'local demand'. The local demand is thus not articulated by local actors, but mostly through the needs and demands of the international agendas. This research touches upon debates in the emerging anthropological field of ethical economies (Dolan and Rajak 2016), a growing body of literature that meets at the crossroads of economic and moral anthropology.
Subject(s) corporate social responsibility, social impact, private sector development, Sudan, discursive practices, Impact Hub Khartoum
Language en
Type of publication Master thesis
Format image/pdf
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/ClosedAccess
Repository Utrecht - University of Utrecht
Added to C-A: 2020-03-04;09:45:24