From corporate boardrooms to the butcher's paper and whiteboards of activist workshops, the phrase ‘supply chain politics' has become increasingly commonplace. It is now routine practice for major global companies to hire specialist staff responsible for ‘supply chain compliance', which...

It is now commonplace for the language of accountability to be invoked in debates about transnational power and governance. Yet there is little agreement on whether ‘accountability' takes an analogous form between national and transnational governance domains, and thus whether transnational...

This chapter examines the contested social processes through which contemporary global corporations are ‘socially embedded': that is, conditioned and constrained by the social relationships in which they participate. The chapter asks how such social embedding occurs, and offers an answer...

The financial crisis of 2008–9 and the ‘Great Recession' that it precipitated highlighted a number of troubling dynamics in contemporary capitalism. Rising financial instability has received particular attention (Obstfeld and Rogoff 2009), as have other social problems such as trends of...

Home and field office staff disagreement often impedes international development NGOs (INGOs) from making their accountability systems more responsive to partner and community concerns. Drawing on a staff survey, and qualitative interviews across four country programmes, of a major INGO, three...

As the work of the UN Special Representative (UNSR) for business and human rights moves towards its conclusion in mid-2011, the ‘responsibility to respect' principles have received widespread endorsement from businesses, NGOs and governments. The corporate responsibility to respect is based on...

The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been compared to other historical moments during which significant shifts in regimes of market governance have occurred. Here, we engage with the pieces that follow in this special section of Politics & Society as we consider three dimensions...

For many people throughout the world, the ideal of democracy is now accepted – at least in principle – as the pre-eminent source of political authority and legitimacy. Accordingly, as global-level systems of power, interconnection and organized political governance have expanded in recent...

There is a rising sense within contemporary global politics that the advance of those processes of global interconnectedness that we bluntly refer to as globalisation brings with it increasing problems of injustice on a global scale, in the form of entrenched poverty, social exclusion and the...

Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a...