‘From Soil to Customer’ Corporate Social Responsibility, self-regulation and supply chain control in the agri-food industry

Abstract

To increase the sustainability of their supply chain as an important example of such CSR strategies, companies are increasingly turning to self-regulation initiatives, either individually or collectively as a sector or an industry as a whole. With this development, corporations and industries are entering the arena of food control systems and certification which had previously been dominated by governmental and non-governmental agencies. While there have been many publications on such non-profit based third party initiatives for the food industry, the inherently different nature of corporate self-regulation systems warrants a specialized analytical framework for qualitative study. This need is the research problem from which this study has been developed.