Social Responsibility of Mining Companies at a Time of COVID-19: Dear Shareholders!

This paper examines annual reports (ARs) of multinational mining companies Glencore, Rio Tinto and BHP framed by the challenge of COVID-19 in 2020. We apply a linguistic analysis to screening the letters of chairmen and CEOs that encapsulate an ideology of mining, prioritize the message of sustained and prospective financial success, and display commitment to employees and communities. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore how corporations involved in destructive activities managed to mask the nature of their conduct and promote positive PR when expected to document an on-the-ground involvement with employees and local communities due to the global pandemic. We accounted for the ideology of mining natural resources, the central message foregrounded in the reports, the selection and distribution of key topics and keywords, and relexicalization of critical concepts and descriptions. The CDA revealed “smart management” of COVID-19 aimed to hide facts related to the destruction of the environment and to manipulate people in exchange for education, financial rewards and social improvement. The critical contribution of our paper is that the COVID-19 crisis became an opportunity for corporations to display resilience as well as to manage, dominate and render local populations dependent and vulnerable.

Barriers to environmental sustainability practices of multinational mining companies in Ghana: an institutional complexity perspective

Purpose This paper aims to examine the barriers to the environmental sustainability practices of large-scale mining companies throughout a mine lifecycle, analysed in the context of the plural and competing logics and tensions in the broader institutional environment. Design/methodology/approach The paper used a qualitative methodology based on multiple cases involving multinational mining companies, regulators and other major stakeholder groups, as it offers an opportunity for analytical generalisations where the empirical results are compared to previously established theories. Findings The empirical results indicate that the environmental sustainability barriers are embedded within gaps in Ghana’s natural resources governance framework. The gaps arise out of contradictory interests and values, which hinder the direction and practices of large-scale mining companies. Research limitations/implications The findings may only apply to the context of this study and is inadequate as the basis for assessing the effectiveness or otherwise of specific initiatives of large-scale mining firms in Ghana. Practical implications This paper has implications on how large-scale mining companies and their stakeholders define their values and goals, and engage in a dynamic process to accommodate the multiple and competing logics by implementing effective structures at the organisational and institutional levels. Originality/value This paper contributes to the sustainability and institutional complexity perspective by showing that plural logics are often contradictory, but may also be complementary in situations of complicit commonality, hindering sustainable outcomes. The authors argue that this is one of the few studies that have examined the barriers to environmental sustainability explicated in the context of institutional complexity.

Social Investment Management of PT. Chevron Pacific Indonesia in the framework of National Defense

Ethics in a multinational company environment is related to business problems, but the position of corporate partnership determines sustainable companies. The study aims to integrate the concept of social investment (SI) with state defense in multinational mining companies' environment. Social Investment (SI) business ethics as part of Corporate Citizenship (CC) has a different concept base. CSR for companies is an honest effort for companies towards the surrounding community. Whereas the State Defense is a political concept of the State that regulates citizens' rights and obligations in defending the country. The ethnographic method can combine the CSR and State Defense models in the multinational company oil mine environment. Chevron Pacific Indonesia Inc.'s CSR in international companies is called Social Investment (SI) has a dilemma; because CSR is seen as a long-term corporate interest, on the other hand, the regional Government distributes a small portion of profits to the surrounding community. After analyzing PT Chevron Pacific Indonesia's CSR and the Regional Government's strategy in realizing public welfare in the context of state defense, researchers can formulate the Corporate Citizenship (CC) as the State Defense CSR model.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Development: A Case Study of Multinational Mining Companies in Sierra Leone

The study employs a multi case study analyses from the three mining communities. Proportionate sampling and purposive sampling techniques were applied in selecting the number of participants used in this study. The chiefdoms were grouped into two neighborhoods (Management staff and community stakeholders). The study found out at communities’ levels that companies have been responsive to their host communities to some extent, by contributing to socioeconomic development at certain level through the use of CSR policies. Their contributions included jobs creation and employees’ upgrading and; infrastructural development such as, constructions of housing, schools, clinics, feeder roads and; offer scholarships to school going youths, and support agribusiness in the various communities from the mineral proceeds. There are also indications that developmental projects across the three mining communities are in some way benefiting some stakeholders or locals as part of the mining companies’ contributions towards attaining sustainable development in the affected communities. On the environmental, the study revealed that organisations were set up to handle environmental issues in the three communities. And, there have been some amount of compensation given for resettlements and crops reparations. Nevertheless, communities were not total involved on decisions affecting major environmental issues.

The spirit underneath: development, race and moral economy in Central Mozambique

Since 2007, Tete, a province in central Mozambique, has been experiencing an economic boom. Multinational mining companies are exploring one of the world’s largest - and virtually untouched - coal deposits. Led by Brazilian-based multinational Vale, the controversial billionaire investment plans caught the attention of international NGOs and cooperation agencies that flooded Tete province with development and democracy-building projects. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Tete are suspicious. People in Tete have encountered various exogenous populations since pre-colonial times and are extremely familiar with the methodology of development organizations. However, the current "developmental and democratic times" pose an intriguing question to them: can we develop? To clarify this existential question - that has deep spiritual and racial implications - the article discusses the nature of inter-ethnic political community in the Zambezi Valley, correlating it with the region’s pre-colonial and colonial history.

Goolarabooloo Futures: Mining and Aborigines in Northwest Australia

In our apparently postcolonial age, colonization is proceeding apace in Goolarabooloo country near Broome in Western Australia where sovereignty has never been ceded, and no treaty ratified. The colonial ‘settler’ economy was established in the late 19th century with the pearling and pastoral industries, but today it is multinational mining companies (‘extraction colonialism’) that are extending their reach with the urging of the State government and even some Aboriginal agencies. This ethnographic study describes two ‘worlds’: Those (the ‘Moderns’) who like to see themselves as ‘naturally’ extending the territory of a universalist modernity via their institutions of science and technology, governmental organisation, the law and the economy. Under scrutiny, this world turns out to be less robust institutionally and conceptually than it pretends to be; it operates with fantasies, blunders, poor planning, little negotiation and waste. Often it works, but in the instance of the four-year struggle between Woodside Energy and the Goolarabooloo, the latter was able to resist the former’s desire to build a liquefied gas plant on their traditional land. Woodside and its partners left with billions of dollars wasted in the effort. The ‘world’ of the Indigenous Goolarabooloo is the second group of institutions my extended ethnography will describe.