Transnational Business and the Politics of Social Risk : Re-Embedding Transnational Supply Chains Through Private Governance

Throughout recent economic history, social struggle over the regulation and distribution of social costs, benefits and risks associated with capitalist economic relations have been both pervasive and continually evolving. Such contestation surrounding how capitalist forms of accumulation, production and exchange are constituted and regulated by broader social norms and relationships has often been characterised as a struggle over the terms on which capitalist economies are ‘socially embedded'—in Karl Polanyi's influential language. These regulatory processes draw on state and non-state actors, a range of formal organisations and social institutions, as well as broader and more nebulous features of the social environment. Importantly, the concept of embedding also entails a particular normative view of how the costs, benefits and risks associated with participation in capitalist economic relations should be managed and distributed. The normative view usually associated with a Polanyian concept of embedding has tended to stress the value of reducing or at least more fairly allocating relevant social costs and risks