The Political Dynamics of Sustainable Coffee: Contested Value Regimes and the Transformation of Sustainability

By David L. Levy, Juliane Reinecke, S. Manning. 2016

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The global coffee sector has seen a transformation towards more ‘sustainable’ forms of production, and, simultaneously, the continued dominance of mainstream coffee firms and practices. We examine this paradox by conceptualizing the underlying process of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as a series of long-term, multi-dimensional interactions between civil society and corporate actors, drawing from the neo-Gramscian concepts of hegemony and passive revolution. A longitudinal study of the evolution of coffee sustainability standards suggests that PCSR can be understood as a process of challenging and defending value regimes, within which viable configurations of economic models, normative-cultural values, and governance structures are aligned and stabilized. Specifically, we show how dynamics of moves and accommodations between challengers and corporate actors shape the practice and meaning of ‘sustainable’ coffee. The results contribute to understanding the political dynamics of CSR as a dialectic process of ‘revolution/restoration’, or passive revolution, whereby value regimes assimilate and adapt to potentially disruptive challenges, transforming sustainability practices and discourse.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/920bb44a3215a0f8fc51582f7e54cf91c285c9dc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Business and International Management

1. S. Manning
2. J. Grabs
3. N. Boso
4. S. Ponte
5. Chris Bacon
6. Laura T. Raynolds
7. Joni Valkila
8. J. Neilson

In Strategy and Management

1. J. Grabs
2. S. Manning
3. Thomas Bejarano
4. Ogechi Adeola
5. N. Boso
6. A. Danso
7. M. Uddin
8. Magnus Hultman

Citations in the corpus

• Social Movements as Catalysts for Corporate Social Innovation: Environmental Activism and the Adoption of Green Information Systems (2019, unknown): “This has enabled firms to accommodate demands for disclosure and legitimacy, while also meeting business objectives such as lowering energy costs, and risk and reputation management (Levy et al., 2015).”
• Convincing the crowd: Entrepreneurial storytelling in crowdfunding campaigns (2017, background): “Not surprisingly, recent studies suggest that standard-setters in order to maintain their identity in dynamic sustainability arenas often tell and connect stories about their origin and future vision, following an ongoing journey style (Levy et al., 2016; Manning and Reinecke, 2016).”
• Does financial resource slack drive sustainability expenditure in developing economy small and medium-sized enterprises? (2017, background): “This finding helps provide an empirical grounding for the assumption that greater connectedness between corporate and political leaders helps weaken the propensity of firms to commit more resources to sustainability causes (Levy, Reinecke, and Manning, 2015).”
• The evolution of power in the global coffee value chain and production network (2019, background): “battle for market dominance also reverberated across the industry, causing other roasters to strengthen their own portfolios (Landini and Clarke, 2016).”