Paper short abstract:

While marketing brings social and sustainable aspects of brands to the fore, the garment sector pulls into the opposite direction aiming to produce and sell faster and cheaper. This paper explores Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability as mediating practices serving contradictory trends.

Paper long abstract:

While marketing brings social and sustainable aspects of brands to the fore, the garment sector pulls into the opposite direction aiming to produce and sell faster and cheaper. This paper explores how these contradicting trends shape the mandate of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability (CSR&S) departments, who are perpetrating yet mediating between these opposing market demands while addressing the economic and social risks created by the run for profit.

This paper draws on data from three years of ethnographic research including participatory observation on Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability in a Turkish holding company. Following Røyrvik (2011), I offer a cultural analysis of contemporary CSR&S practices with regard to branding. This study provides a particularly interesting case in point as the very same brand name stands for the brand, the holding, and the owning family. It thus gives insights into the economic realm of branding as well as its political and social dimensions - all interlinked in the CSR&S practices. I discuss these practices not only as a way of external branding, but as mediating practices which aim to ease the contradictions between the opposing trends and in doing so create new forms of (asymmetric) relationships within networks of production, distribution, and consumption. In a context which is highly politically charged, I will show how the social and sustainable practices shift labor power relations and lead to power accumulation centered in the holding companies on the one hand and to increasingly contradictory demands for individuals on the other.