Does the Nordic Model Make a Difference? Corporate ethics of Norwegian energy companies going abroad

Seminar

Datum
29.05.2018 16:15 - 18:00

Organisator(en)
Joint Institutes Colloquium, MPI for Social Anthropology and Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, MLU

Vortragende(r)
Ståle Knudsen, University of Bergen, Norway

Ort
Main Seminar Room

Beschreibung
It has been claimed that Nordic companies are particularly well placed to handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) because of their embeddedness in a Nordic corporate culture. Norwegian energy corporations, which to a large extent are state-owned, started operating abroad around 1990. This was a consequence of the opening up of international markets as well as deregulation at home. While working far away from home, these energy corporations relate and adapt to local and national particularities in place of operation. Also, the standards and procedures for CSR or sustainability to which they relate are set and managed by international institutions. And, in their quest for profit, they compete globally with other transnational corporations. Does the ‘Nordic model’ make a difference in this context, and if so, to what extent? Furthermore, does it make a difference that the corporations are wholly or partly state-owned?
The research project Energethics explores these questions by studying the way in which the major Norwegian energy corporations Statoil (soon to be Equinor) and Statkraft, as well as a couple of minor private corporations) handle CSR in their international operations. Fieldwork is conducted not only on the impact of the corporations’ projects (in Indonesia, Canada, Tanzania, Northern Norway, Northern Iraq, Turkey and Brazil), but also on the way in which CSR is handled at various levels of the corporations and in the relevant contexts in which they operate. Thus, the project also takes us to places such as Oslo, Bergen and London, and methodologically involves a variety of approaches, including analyzing documents/reports.
While drawing on findings from the whole project, this presentation will especially focus on the hydropower company Statkraft’s operations in Turkey. Preliminary findings indicate that there is much variation across the case studies, but that CSR/management of sustainability is increasingly embedded in the corporations’ risk assessment, and explicitly so. What CSR is to mean is also constantly under negotiation within corporations, with the major distinction or tension being between field experience with CSR work, on the one hand, and an international reporting regime, on the other hand. Often, CSR work in practice ‘drift’ from company standards to local/national standards for charitable giving. Reporting, on the other hand, strives to standardize and simplify. When the corporations face these realities, the ‘Nordic model’ often drifts out of sight and mind. Perhaps the only place the Nordic model is relevant for these corporations’ operations abroad is back home in Norway? (Speaker's abstract)




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