Political CSR at the coalface – The roles and contradictions of multinational corporations in developing workplace dialogue

While political CSR scholarship has focused on the role of dialogue between MNCs and civil society actors at the transnational level in creating global governance standards, we seek to understand how political CSR might play out at the ‘coalface’ where labour rights violations occur. We draw on insights from Industrial Democracy to examine how political CSR may be extended to enable democratic processes at the workplace level. Studying the introduction of workplace dialogue in Bangladesh apparel factories, we highlight how MNCs leverage their position as lead actors in the supply chain in three ways: as guarantors, capacity‐builders and enforcers of workplace dialogue. Our findings also show that dialogue reveals dialectical tensions emerging from the structured antagonism of the supply chain relationship. Our contribution focuses on understanding how MNCs may enable deliberative spaces in their supply chain, but also how this is likely to change the nature of pCSR.