Corporate Citizenship and Local-Global Alliances: A Case From Ciudad Juarez

国家科学基础地图学和区域科学项目AWARDABSTRACTBCS-0215522梅丽莎·赖特宾夕法尼亚州立大学经济全球化是通过全球经济活动和民间社会中的本地化、非市场关系之间的动态协调来进行的。然而，尽管越来越多的学者强调地方民间机构对全球经济进程的重要性，但全球化研究中所阐述的主流观点重新形成了这样一种偏见，即全球实体不受地方机构的影响。这种偏见在有关跨国公司的文献中尤其明显，这些公司经常被描绘成全球化的主要代理人，在当地做法的影响之外运作。因此，这样的研究没有考虑到当地组织如何影响跨国公司及其在世界各地的影响。这项研究项目将调查跨国公司和当地非营利组织如何通过建立联合民间项目来建立共同的行动基础。这些项目属于“企业公民”的范畴，这一概念越来越多地被企业用来描述它们为满足其人力资源和技术需求而资助和依赖当地民间机构的情况。尽管商业媒体大量提及“企业公民身份”，但这一概念仍未得到充分研究，其对当地公民领域的意义也几乎未被发掘。这项研究将在墨西哥华雷斯的一个为期两年的案例研究中进行。三组问题指导研究：1)公司对人力资源和技术发展的要求如何有助于华雷斯行使公司公民身份？2)当地对性别和国籍的解释如何调解构成公司公民身份实践的公司-公民联盟的形成？3)这些联盟如何影响其参与组织的体制做法和目标？华雷斯被选为研究对象有几个原因。它是Maquiladora工业(墨西哥的出口加工厂)的发源地，也是许多第三世界工业飞地的代表，在这些飞地，跨国公司寻求通过公民活动来升级劳动力和社会基础设施。在过去的五年里，该市的出口加工业增加了与教育和社区组织的公民参与。华雷斯公民部门企业活动的增加反映了跨国企业公民身份在第三世界地区扩大的全球趋势。该项目不仅将调查企业和公民部门的决策者正在做什么，还将调查他们的动机如何通过与其他组织的互动而发生变化，以及这种变化如何影响其机构的行为。因此，研究方法是定性的，既包括开放式访谈，也包括参与者观察。定性技术将与档案研究相结合，将田野调查数据置于更大的理论和经验背景下。这些方法将调查公司和非营利组织的领导人如何做出他们所做的决定，他们如何实施和修改这些决定，以及他们所说的意图有时如何与他们的行动背道而驰。虽然定性方法不适合进行正式的假设检验，但它们将放大和丰富将企业行为与公民行动联系起来的定量调查得出的结果。此外，它们将提供宝贵的洞察力，了解涉及但没有通过对马奎拉多拉行业及其对墨西哥和美墨边境地区发展的影响的定量研究进行调查的过程。

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONGEOGRAPHY AND REGIONAL SCIENCE PROGRAMRESEARCH AWARDABSTRACTBCS-0215522Melissa WrightPennsylvania State University Economic globalization proceeds through a dynamic co-ordination between global economic activities and the localized, non-market relationships found in civil society. Nevertheless, even as more scholars emphasize the significance of local civic institutions for global economic processes, the dominant views articulated in globalization studies recreate the bias that global entities are immune to the influence of local institutions. This bias is particularly found in the literature on multinational firms, which frequently are portrayed as globalization's principal agents, operating beyond the influence of local practices. As a result, such studies fail to consider how local organizations affect multinational corporations and their impact around the world. This research project will investigate how multinational firms and local non-profit organizations establish common ground for action through the creation of joint civic projects. These projects fall under the rubric of "corporate citizenship", which is a concept increasingly employed by corporations to describe their funding for and reliance upon local civic institutions to meet their human resource and technology needs. Despite the proliferation of references to "corporate citizenship" in the business press, this concept remains understudied and its meaning for the local civic domain is virtually unexplored. The research will be carried out in a two-year case study in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico). Three sets of questions guide the research: 1) How do corporate requirements for human resources and technological development contribute to the exercise of corporate citizenship in Ciudad Juarez? 2) How do local interpretations of gender and nationality mediate the formation of the corporate-civic alliances that constitute the practice of corporate citizenship? 3) How do these alliances affect the institutional practices and objectives of their participating organizations? Ciudad Juarez has been chosen as the study are for several reasons. It is the birthplace of the maquiladora industry (the export-processing factories in Mexico) and is representative of many Third World industrial enclaves where multinational firms seek to upgrade the labor force and social infrastructure through civic activity. The city's export-processing maquiladora industry has increased its civic participation with educational and community-based organizations over the last five years. This increased corporate activity in the Ciudad Juarez civic sector mirrors a global trend in the expansion of multinational corporate citizenship across Third World regions. The project will investigate not only what decision-makers in the corporate and civic sectors are doing, but also how their motives change through interaction with other organizations and how such changes affect the behavior of their institutions. The research methods, therefore, are qualitative and involve both open-ended interviews and participant observation. The qualitative techniques will be combined with archival research to put the fieldwork data into a larger theoretical and empirical context. These methods will investigate how leaders in corporate and non-profit organizations make they decisions they do, how they implement and modify them and how their stated intentions sometimes diverge from their actions. While qualitative methods do not lend themselves to formal hypothesis testing, they will amplify and enrich the results derived from quantitative investigations that link corporate behavior with civic action. Further, they will provide valuable insight into processes touched upon but not investigated by quantitative studies of the maquiladora industry and its impact on the regional development of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border.