Business, Modern Slavery and Freedom
Andrew Crane (University of Bath)

Modern slavery has become one of the most high profile human rights challenges of our time. While it represents a severe constraint on human freedom, it is also very much a business problem. How, for example, can businesses and their stakeholders be sure that products are not made with slave labour somewhere along the supply chain? What are the best ways of detecting and preventing modern slavery by business, or of regulating companies to ensure they effectively address the problem? A key challenge here is how to identify modern slavery and whether it makes sense to delineate it from other less extreme forms of worker exploitation. Drawing on a multi-year, multi-study research project on the business of modern slavery, I will address these questions with a view to making sense of modern slavery, exploring what it means for human freedom, and showing how management theory, practical relevance, and real world impact can potentially be fruitfully aligned.

Empowering the Third Billion: Global Markets, Local Enterprise and the Promise of Inclusion
Dinah Rajak (University of Sussex) and Catherine Dolan (SOAS)

Once deemed the ‘hopeless continent’, Africa has been resurrected as a source of economic optimism—a site of investment, growth and buoyant labor markets (The Economist 2000, 2011). Within this context, development donors and transnational corporations champion the power of inclusive markets to redress decades of jobless growth by incorporating the poor and marginalised into new models of financial inclusion and entrepreneurship. Women, held up as development’s greatest asset, have been at the forefront of such initiatives, as novel coalitions of corporations, donors and social enterprises reposition them as ‘entrepreneurs’, who will drive forward economic and social transformation.  This paper examines the inclusive market agenda ethnographically by tracing the experience of a small women-owned enterprise based in Nairobi, Kenya – Mkiwa Designs - on its journey to inclusion in the global marketplace of Magasin, one of the world’s top twenty retailers. Chronicling the efforts of Mkiwa’s directors to scale up and empower their workers, we explore the relationship of corporate patronage and clientelism that unfolds in the enactment of this promise of market inclusion. We find that the conversion required to attain anticipated rewards of the global marketplace, leaves small enterprises like Mkiwa, constrained, rather than free; leveraged and dependent rather than secure and autonomous. The inclusive market, we suggest, becomes a vehicle of unfulfilled aspiration and opportunity foreclosed, a space of clientelism that falls short of its empowerment and inclusionary ideals.

Business and Development Studies: Issues and Perspectives
Michael Wendelboe Hansen and Peter Lund-Thomsen (both CBS)

Business and Development Studies: Issues and Perspectives provides a comprehensive collection of theoretical and empirical contributions to the emerging field of business and development studies. Compared to more traditional business-school accounts of business in developing countries which focus on the challenges and opportunities of doing business in developing countries, this anthology explores whether, how, and under what conditions business contributes to the achievement of economic, social, and environmental goals in developing countries. The book consolidates the current status of academic work on business and development, identifies state of the art in relation to this academic field, and establishes a future research agenda for ‘business and development studies’ as an emerging academic discipline within the social sciences.

At the book launch, we will provide a short introduction to and overview of the book with subsequent opportunity for comments/queries from webinar participants.