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Colonial Extractions
Challenging Canada’s image as a humane, enlightened global actor, Colonial Extractions examines the troubling racial logic that underpins Canadian mining operations in several African countries. Drawing on colonial, postcolonial, and critical race theory, Paula Butler investigates Canadian mining activities and the discourses which serve to legitimate this work.
Through a series of interviews with senior personnel of businesses with mining operations in Africa, Butler identifies a continuation of the same colonialist mindset that saw resource ownership and racial dominance over Indigenous peoples in Canada as part of Canada’s nation-building project. Financially, culturally, and psychologically, Canadians are invested in extracting resource-based wealth in the Global South, and – as Butler’s analysis of Canada’s influence over South Africa’s first post-apartheid mining legislation shows – they look to legitimize that extraction through neoliberal legal frameworks and a powerful national myth of benevolence.
Complementing analyses of the industry through political economy or critical development studies, Colonial Extractions is a powerful and unsettling critique of the cultural dimension of Canada’s mining industry overseas.
eBook
Never rest on your ores : building a mining company, one stone at a time
\"A lively story of luck and perseverance in the building of a major mining company. A century ago, a prospector discovered gold at Ontario's Kirkland Lake and a son was born to British immigrants in Saskatchewan. The boy--Norman Bell Keevil--went on to become a renowned scientist, teacher, and prospector, discovering a small but high-grade copper mine in Ontario. Parlaying that into control of the Kirkland Lake gold mine fifty years later, he formed the fledgling mining company Teck Corporation. In Never Rest on Your Ores, Keevil's son Norman, also a geoscientist, recounts how over the next fifty years, a growing team of like-minded engineers and entrepreneurs built Canada's largest diversified mining company. In candid detail he tells the story of a company and its makers, of the discovery and creation of mines, the mechanics of industry financing, and the role that mergers and acquisitions play in a volatile environment. Along the way he meets fascinating captains of industry and politicians not only in Canada, but in the United States and around the world. Finding an ore body--rock that holds valuable metals and minerals--and promoting its development in order to finance and create a mine, most often in hard-to-access wilderness, is complicated work, comparable to locating and extracting a needle in a very messy haystack. Underlying this history is a constant need to replenish the ore, and this need drives the people involved. A detailed and revealing history of a company that he helped to grow and lead for many years, Norman Keevil's Never Rest on Your Ores is both entertaining and instructive, a rare insider's account of an industry that has been crucial to the building of this country.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
My best frenemy: a history-to-theory approach to MNCs’ corporate diplomatic activities
We study how a multinational corporation may take advantage of geopolitical tensions to further its goals. We maintain that multinationals can influence the diplomatic relationship between the host and the home countries by acting as a diplomatic broker between the two. We advance the concept of corporate diplomatic activities to describe this strategy and to theorize its benefits and risks. To this end, we adopt a history-to-theory approach and examine the role the US multinational Standard Oil of New Jersey played in settling a diplomatic impasse between the United States and Colombia in the 1910s and 1920s. We show that the multinational can mobilize its political resources and capabilities at home to increase the host government's bargaining power vis-à-vis the home country and, in return, obtain business benefits in the host country. The corporate diplomatic activities, however, can backfire. If the multinational invests in site-specific assets in the host country after successfully negotiating on the host country’s behalf, the host government can use these assets as \"hostages\" to pressure the multinational into negotiating on its behalf again in the multinational's home country.
Journal Article
Company Towns
Neil White challenges the common interpretation of company towns as powerless, dependant communities by exploring how these settlements were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance.
eBook
Private Regulatory Fragmentation as Public Policy: Governing Canada's Mining Industry
This paper addresses recent calls to study the role of the state in private regulation. Integrating current scholarship on the state as a catalyst of private regulatory regimes with prior literature on regulatory failure and self-regulation, it identifies and problematizes unsettled assumptions used as a starting point by this growing body of research. The case study traces the evolution of public debates and the interaction of different regulatory initiatives dealing with corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in Canada's mining industry. Findings reveal the conditions under which the state is more likely to encourage firm-level, fragmented initiatives than facilitate and promote industry-wide regulatory strengthening and consolidation. I discuss the need for greater analytical precision regarding the variation in regulatory policy preferences across time and branches of government and the interaction between public and private regulatory initiatives. The conclusion outlines suggested areas for future research as well as the likely outcome of Canada's current CSR policy framework.
Journal Article
More with Less
Explores the changing character of industrial relations and labour processes in two staple industries, potash and uranium mining, through an innovative case-analytic approach that compares the managerial strategies used by five transnational firms.
eBook
Miners, politics and institutional caryatids: Accounting for the transfer of HRM practices in the Brazilian multinational enterprise
This article contributes to the growing stream of research on power and micro-politics in the MNE. It is situated in the critical realist epistemology. It adopts Burawoy's extended case study method together with a context-sensitive and an actor-centered mode of explanation. The case is intriguing: a MNE from Brazil expands into Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway and imposes a new pay and performance management system, contrasting with existing host norms. The article uses this to examine interrelated questions about the influence of an emerging-economy parent business system and how this interacts with the well-developed institutional regulation of the host countries. Hence we are forced into the interesting realm of multilevel analysis about MNEs, power relations and institutional change. We argue that the transfer of HRM practices within MNEs is best explained by a consideration of institutions, organizational structures, actors' postures within and beyond the MNE, and their relational interplay. Specifically, it requires an analysis of the macro-political context (home and host institutional influences; subsidiaries' size, mode of establishment, history, value chain location; and the host economies' dependence on foreign investment) on which actors' identities and interests are formed, and on which the ensuing micro-political relations are played out.
Journal Article
Imperialism and Resistance: Canadian mining companies in Latin America
David Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession is a useful framework for understanding the predatory activities of Canadian mining companies in Latin America. Capitalist imperialism is rooted in the logic of a socioeconomic system that is driven by the competitive pursuit of profit based on the exploitation of labour, and which is prone to over-accumulation. Capital, backed by state power, pursues a spatial fix to resolve the systematic crisis of over-accumulation. The creation of new spaces of accumulation is not an innocuous process; it inevitably involves the forceful and violent reorganisation of peoples' lives as they are subordinated to the whims of capital. Strategies of accumulation by dispossession by capital therefore commonly spawn popular resistance from the affected communities. The Canadian mining industry is the largest in the world, and much of its outward investment targets Latin America. The Canadian company share of the larger company exploration market in Latin America (and the Caribbean) has grown steadily since the early 1990s, up to 35% by 2004, the largest by far among all its competitors, with seven Canadian companies among the top 20 mineral exploration investors in the region from 1989 to 2001. This paper charts these trends of Canadian mining expansion in Latin America and then focuses on the community, environmental and worker resistance it is generating in the cases of Chile and Colombia.
Journal Article
\Understanding the words of relationships\: Language as an essential tool to manage CSR in communities of place
Multinational enterprises (MNEs) encounter relentless stakeholder pressures when operating across linguistic, cultural and institutional boundaries. Our aims are to examine whether and how acquisition of language resources may help MNEs to bridge these boundaries and reduce pressures on MNE legitimacy by improving their corporate social responsibility (CSR) outcomes. We propose an MNE model of language resource acquisition policy based on three language orientations: \"language-as-problem,\" \"language-as-resource\" and \"languageas-right.\" Using sociolinguistic tools - an \"ecological\" analysis of how language affects MNE-stakeholder relationships - and surveying 15 mining MNEs from Australia, Canada, China, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom operating in East Africa, our research found some MNEs employ regional lingua francas like Swahili and local leadership practices to build sustainable relationships with local stakeholders. These local stakeholders are members of communities of place (CofP), who steward the land their ancestors have inhabited for centuries, and their voices have grown as to how that land is used. As their voices have grown, MNEs should improve CSR outcomes with CofP through better communications. A well-designed language acquisition policy may improve such communication and so fend off threats to MNE legitimacy.
Journal Article