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This special issue will focus on processes and mechanisms of the making and unmaking of alliances among different grassroots, civil society, and social movement organizations. The formation of alli...

Public policies implemented to flatten the curve of COVID-19 infections created unprecedented challenges for social movements. Most striking was the de facto temporary suspension of the right to as...

As an Introduction to the Debate section that follows, this article develops the concept of ‘Networks of Labour Activism’ (NOLA) as a distinct, and important, aspect of cross-border, cross-organizational mobilization of workers, trade unions and other organizations and groups. NOLAs are seen as different from traditional labour activist networks in that they are neither solely connected to the position of labour in production processes, nor wholly reliant on the soft and discursive power of advocacy coalitions. The authors understand NOLAs to be characterized by the interaction of different types of labour rights, social movement and community organizations, joining forces in complex forms of strategizing vis-a-vis multiple targets. Thus, cross-boundary strategizing (across organizational and geographical divides) is seen as a basic characteristic of NOLAs. The authors argue that NOLAs continue to be deeply embedded in political-economic contexts of the state and global value chains, and alliance formation reflects the peculiar vulnerabilities and constraints resulting from this embeddedness. This Introduction draws on multiple studies of NOLAs from around the world, but its main focus is on some of those Asian countries which are at the centre of global supply chain capitalism and labour exploitation, and which have become the laboratory for new forms of networked worker agency and activism.

Social movements have become increasingly important in the regulation of working conditions in a context where the intensification of global economic integration, the consolidation of power in multinational enterprises, increased financialization and marketization, and recurrent economic crisis have undermined the capacity of trade unions to co-determine working conditions in transnational businesses. With unions and industrial modes of worker participation being under severe pressure, social movements and civil society organizations receive increasing attention as new actors in industrial relations.

The chapter discusses the dual nature of corporate transparency politics as a means of governing and taming corporate power and as an instrument of corporate control and profit maximization. The authors conceptualize four levels of transparency practices in global production networks, arguing that the consideration of these levels is necessary to understand the political nature of corporate transparency. As Scheper and Zajak show, these levels are relevant with regard to the wider dynamics of power relations, political conflicts and social change in global production networks because they link conflicts around corporate transparency with the broader debate about the ‘new’ political role of transnational corporations and a changing relationship between states, markets and civil society. The chapter concludes by calling for a new research agenda on transnational transparency politics, which introduces a cultural perspective on knowledge practices and links it with a political-sociological view on power and governance struggles.

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.

In the analytical framework, I argued that China’s internal and external strengths are relevant to transnational labor-rights activism, as the political regime might prevent domestic organizations from going transnational or because, as a global power, China uses its external strength to impact the transnational institutional environment in which activism takes place. In addition, I also put forward that domestic factors are important to understand the outcomes of transnational labor-rights activism, at the level of working conditions inside Chinese supplying factories (market pathway) and the empowerment of domestic organizations (capacity-building pathway). In this chapter, I open the black box of “China’s internal and external strength” affecting labor-rights activism. These factors include the evolution of a large rural-migrant workforce with the introduction of capitalism in China; the iterative process of labor protest and reforms of the labor law; sources of the implementation deficit of the Chinese labor law and attempts to overcome them; the development of the Chinese system of industrial relations, Chinese fragmented yet resilient version of authoritarianism, as well as the changing domestic state–society relationship. Developments of these factors help to explain why the Chinese state tends to resist certain forms of transnational activism while being responsive to others.

The central question of this chapter is how social movement actors produce and promote cultural change across national and local settings. We define culture as a set of practices that have shared meanings. Cultural change is thus a change in practices and/or in meanings attached to them. In an increasingly interconnected world, one way for social movements to induce cultural change is to borrow ideas and practices from other settings and install them in their own cultural environment, or to modify existing practices by incorporating borrowed cultural elements or new meanings into them. Social movements can also borrow cultural elements from international law and global discourses, such as environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and human rights, and localize them in a specific cultural setting. In the social movement literature, this process of ideas and practices travelling across borders is referred to as diffusion.