Trading Diamons Responsibly

Sociological Forum, Vol. 26, No.
3, September 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2011.01260.x
Trading Diamonds Responsibly: Institutional

Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility
Franziska Bieri1 and John Boli2
This article identies factors that led to a comprehensive regulatory regime for the global diamond
trade, the Kimberley Process Certication Scheme (KPCS), established through negotiations among
NGOs, states, and the industry. The conict diamonds case provides important insights into the
processes by which global norms redene how corporations are expected to conduct business. First,
we show that global corporate social responsibility (CSR) norms rooted in the construct of world
citizenship facilitated the rapid progress of the conict diamonds campaign. Second, we detail how
these norms became institutionalized in the KPCS, stressing the importance of the legitimacy of
NGOs as bearers of corporate world citizenship models and the role of moral leaders within the diamond
industry itself. We consider two theoretical perspectives on CSR development: management theories,
which are strong on practitioner issues but mute regarding the content and authority of CSR ideology,
and institutional theories, which offer better frameworks for understanding the impact of cultural and
institutional environments on company responses to the moral claims advanced by NGOs. We use the
conict diamonds case to draw conclusions about how NGOs can effectively dene new social responsibilities that companies come to see as obligations they must heed as responsible world citizens.
KEY WORDS: conict diamonds; corporate social responsibility; global governance; global
norms; nongovernment organizations; world citizenship.
INTRODUCTION
This article advances our theoretical understanding of corporate social
responsibility (CSR) by identifying factors that facilitated the emergence of
new norms and the implementation of regulations in the global diamond
trade. The diamond business has seen tremendous changes in the past decade,
moving from a highly unregulated industry to what likely is the most farreaching trade regulation regime instituted in recent decades. This sweeping
change was initiated by a set of carefully documented reports by NGOs and
the United Nations about the role of diamonds in nancing brutal civil wars
in West Africa in the 1990s. Diamonds were no longer glittering symbols of
1
2
Department of Sociology, University of Maryland University College Europe, ImBosseldorn 30,

69126 Heidelberg, Germany; e-mail: fbieri1@faculty.ed.umuc.edu.
Department of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 30322.
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love; they became conict diamonds or blood diamonds, linked to village

massacres, chopped-off limbs, and massive refugee emergencies. As a statement in 2001 by De Beers, the dominant global diamond company, put it,
once conict diamonds had become a prominent global issue: It is appalling
that a product which is the ultimate symbol of enduring love and purity and
all that is best in mankind should be linked in any way with the obscenity of
war and the suffering of the innocent (De Beers Group, 2001:14). In
response, states, NGOs, and the industry created the Kimberley Process Certication Scheme (KPCS), a voluntary international agreement regulating the
diamond trade. Designed and implemented with remarkable speed, the KPCS
has restructured the way diamonds are traded globally. It is a striking example
of the practical implications of CSR concerns. Amid continuing debates surrounding the motives for and effects of CSR, the conict diamonds campaign
managed to extend the reach of CSR principles into the diamond industry,
which had been isolated from and largely immune to CSR culture. The KPCS
translated CSR rhetoric into concrete actions enforced by a regulatory certication system.
Adopted in 2003, the KPCS controls the trade in rough diamonds.
Today, 75 countries participate, accounting for about 99% of the global rough
diamond trade. In this formally voluntary scheme, all member states have formally adopted domestic legislation in accordance with the minimum criteria
set out by the KPCS, which require the establishment of comprehensive control systems and the issuance of KP certicates for all rough diamonds. In the
United States, for instance, the KPCS was implemented via the passage of the
Clean Diamond Trade Act in July 2003, writing into law specic diamond
trade requirements regarding record keeping, oversight, customs operations,
and penalties for violations. In addition, diamond-producing states in the KP
must put internal control systems in place to track rough diamonds all the
way from the mine to the nished gem, a journey that often crosses multiple
borders. The KPCS has in essence become compulsory for any state seeking
to trade in diamonds because countries in the KPCS must agree to trade only
with other KPCS members. High levels of participation in the agreement leave
outsiders without trading partners. Private industry entities in any KP member
state must follow the legally binding requirements, trading only those diamonds that are accompanied by KPCS certicates verifying their conict-free
origins. CSR principles on diamond trading have become legally codied with
the passing of national legislation in many countries. The KPCS is therefore
much more far reaching than a voluntary code of conduct, which could merely
serve the preemptive function of avoiding stringent state regulation. Such is
not the case here: the KPCS is enforced via the KPs membership criteria and
mandatory state legislation and implementation.
The KPCS has been largely successful in curbing the trade of diamonds
from conict regions in western and central Africa, with the notable exceptions of Cote dIvoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo. U.N. sanctions
prohibit the export of rough diamonds from Cote dIvoire, but rebel groups
Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility
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smuggle diamonds into the KP pipeline via neighboring countries, particularly

Mali and Ghana, both of which are KP members. Conict diamonds are also
smuggled from the eastern DRC, where ghting continues. Still, the prevailing
estimate is that conict diamonds now account for less than 1% of the total
diamond trade, a dramatic reduction from some 515% in the 1990s. A second concern is illegitimate trading by a few KP member countries. Most
recently, the KP has come under re for failing to take vigorous action with
respect to Zimbabwe, despite mounting evidence that KPCS standards are
being violated.3
States are the formal implementers of the KPCS, but nonstate actors have
well-dened roles within this global regulatory framework. The diamond
industry is represented at the KP by the World Diamond Council (WDC), an
industry organization that was created in 2000 in response to growing global
pressure to take action regarding conict diamonds. NGOs have observer
status in the KP, but this designation understates their importance in the organization, as we show below. The two NGOs that have consistently represented
global civil society at the KP are Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada (PAC). In initial KP proceedings, they were joined by other, more prominent civil society groups, including representatives from ActionAid, Amnesty
International, and Oxfam International. The door to early KP engagement
was wide open, and neither states nor the industry preselected NGO participants to keep more radical voices away from the negotiating table. However,
consistent representation of African NGOs at the KP was restricted due to the
high costs associated with attendance at frequent KP meetings around the
globe. Over time, resource constraints and the increasingly bureaucratic nature
of implementation also led several of the more campaign-oriented NGOs like
Amnesty and Oxfam to leave their seats at the KP table.
NGO and industry representation at the KP extends to key areas of decision making and global implementation of the KPCS. The KPs working
group system mechanism is tripartite in nature. In the absence of a central
secretariat, most of the tasks are accomplished in seven working groups.
Nonstate actors are involved in all activities of these groups, including setting
requirements for the submission of trade data by member states, monitoring
compliance, and deciding how to handle noncompliance. These and other key
decisions are made within the working groups, while the biannual plenary
meetings, with all KP participants and observers present, usually involve mere
rubber-stamping of working group recommendations. Thus, thanks to the tripartite nature of the working group system, NGO and industry inuence is
remarkably extensive.
3
Zimbabwe has been criticized for massive human rights violations and widespread violence in
the Marange diamond area, much of which is attributable to Mugabes military and police
forces (PAC, 2009, 2010). The KP has been considering suspending Zimbabwe for some time
but has yet to do so. While illegitimate, diamonds exported from Zimbabwe are not conict diamonds, which the KP denes as rough diamonds traded by rebel groups to nance their war
efforts. Repressive governments that derive revenues from diamond exports cannot be held
accountable under the KP.
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The new norms that were created during the conict diamonds campaigndening the trade in conict diamonds as immoral, socially irresponsible, and unacceptablehave been institutionalized in the KPs organizational
structure. Through the working group system, the KPs participation criteria,
and its mandatory minimum standards, the KP has redened legitimate diamond trading practices. Seen more broadly, the conict diamonds case provides important lessons about the processes by which global norms redene
how corporations are expected to do business. We focus on two key processes
at work in this case. First, global-level CSR norms shaped industry responses
to the conict diamonds campaign, facilitating rapid progress in developing
new business practices driven by moral or normative considerations. Diffuse
norms about corporate responsibilities prompted the diamond industry to be
more responsive to the moral exhortations of the NGOs behind the conict
diamonds campaign. While CSR norms were not yet rmly rooted in the
secretive industry of diamond trading prior to this campaign, several exceptionally CSR-oriented industry actors helped set the tone for others. Led by
De Beers, the dominant player in the diamond trade, the industry came to
accept both the legitimacy of its NGO critics and the compelling nature of
their concerns. Ignoring the problems or disavowing responsibility for them
became untenable propositions.
Second, the Kimberley Process reveals mechanisms by which normative
frameworks become institutionalized in concrete social responsibility practices,
that is, the process that matches action to words. Small, low-budget NGOs
were crucial participants and, often, the driving force in the regulation of the
international diamond trade. Their efforts were reinforced by progressive
leaders in the industry and by proactive state representativessome driven
principally by moral considerations, others perhaps more nancially or politically motivated.4 Initial normative claims about the unacceptability of conict
diamonds were quickly matched by formal state regulatory mechanisms; new
diamond trade norms diffused via national implementation. The KP demonstrates how multistakeholder engagement can produce cooperative relations
that achieve tangible and largely effective results despite great power disparities among the participants. We identify the mechanisms and factors that led
to a positive outcome. Inversely, our analysis also helps us understand why
other instances of global negotiations may fail when they lack the favorable
conditions present in the conict diamonds case.
Two ndings regarding the institutionalization of global norms stand out.
First, NGOs were able to push the diamond industry and diamond trading
states to redene how they think and act. NGOs were inuential in all stages
4
Major diamond producers, such as South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, and major diamond
trading states, such as Israel, Britain, and Belgium, had a clear material interest in resolving the
conict diamonds issue. South Africa also saw an opportunity to show leadership on global
humanitarian matters during its rst postapartheid decade. Mixed motives account for Canadas
deep engagement: an emerging diamond industry and a strong commitment to humanitarian
foreign relations policies.
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of the norm development process, from norm innovation to maturation: they

catapulted this previously ignored issue onto the world stage, they helped
shape a global institution charged with enforcing newly created rules, and they
cried foul when other actors failed to deliver. Invoking CSR principles, NGOs
expanded the frontier of norms about corporate behavior. Such social movement efforts involving intense negotiations between NGOs, states, and corporations are a key mechanism whereby global CSR norms encompass an ever
greater number of industries and reach ever more rms around the world. Second, global cultural norms can spread despite ongoing contestation regarding
their validity and merits. When vague CSR principles are transformed into
concrete policies like the KPCSa sign of norm maturation in itselfcontestation and debate about the validity of the underlying principles dies out. That
diamond trading states and the industry must act ethically by not trading
blood diamonds becomes taken for granted: publicly proclaiming the contrary
would beand has beensanctioned. The fundamental raison detre of the
KP stands undisputed, though this by no means implies that the organization
is conict free. Thus, we observe the expansion of CSR norms in terms of
both breadth and depth: new principles regarding ethical diamond trading,
rooted in CSR logic, expanded to previously unaffected market segments and,
via tripartite negotiations, reached a threshold of taken-for-grantedness that
made the principles essentially obligatory for companies and states engaged in
the diamond trade.
THEORIZING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

The literature on corporate social responsibility is vast but theoretical
work explaining the global growth of CSR norms is sparse. For the most part,
the CSR literature is practitioner-oriented, describing CSR behavior or promoting CSR norms and practices. Most CSR studies focus on one or more
mainly practical themes: dening CSR or assessing how social or responsible CSR practices really are (Shamir, 2004; Vogel, 2005), charting the extent
of CSR practices by rms or industries (see, on Coca-Cola, Fortun and
Fortun, 2007; on Chiquita, Taylor and Scharlin, 2004; on the apparel industry,
Cavanagh, 1997 and DeWinter, 2001), identifying the societal benets or
drawbacks of CSR (Henderson, 2001; Kyle and Ruggie, 2005; Porter and
Kramer, 2006; Reich, 2007; Robinson, 2002), or studying the effects of CSR
on nancial performance (Barnett, 2007; Cochran and Wood, 1984). Some
research analyzes social movement efforts to increase responsible practices by
business and industry (e.g., Pellow, 2001 on the environment; Tarrow, 2005 on
antineoliberalism). More generally, scholars explore the extra-institutional
inuencesmaterial and symbolic in natureexerted by social movements in
attempts to change dominant institutions and to pressure companies and states
to alter their behavior (Armstrong and Bernstein, 2008; King and Soule,
2007). In a study of anticorporate protests in the United States, Soule (2009)
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shows how social movement campaigns for social change and justice can pressure corporations and the state simultaneously. King and Soule (2007) track
the effects of social movement protest activities on stock price returns, nding
that greater media coverage of protest events, as well as of the rm as such,
mediates the relationship. Other social movement studies have examined
global anticorporate campaigns (Cavanagh, 1997; DeWinter, 2001; Taylor
and Scharlin, 2004). However, such studies focus not on CSR norms but on
relationships between social movements and states or industries. Little work
has been done on how social movements use CSR norms strategically, on how
movements participate in the CSR norm creation process, or on how
movements engage in the implementation of new corporate social normsall
of which are foci of our study.
Empirical research usually positions CSR as an independent variable,
investigating its effects on nancial performance (Rowley and Berman, 2000;
Walsh et al., 2003). Walsh et al. (2003) report that scholarly articles published
from 1972 to 2002 treated CSR as a dependent variable just 15% of the time
and, in most such articles, only nancial variables were studied. Management
research revolves primarily around the issue of nancial incentives for corporations to act responsibly (e.g., Margolis et al., 2007; Porter and Kramer,
2006; Smith, 1990), and proponents of CSR frequently cite research that
shows how responsible practices have positive effects on the bottom line
(Reich, 2007; Robinson, 2002; Yaziji, 2004). Other management studies
develop the view that companies may benet from socially responsible behavior due to the insurance-like protection it provides (Godfrey, 2005; Kyle
and Ruggie, 2005). Essentially, CSR endows companies with a positive image
among consumers, shareholders, or the general public, which in times of crisis
can become an asset for the company. On the distaff side, some studies claim,
far from conclusively, that CSR engagement has negative effects on the bottom line (Henderson, 2001; Vogel, 2005). At best, CSR practices appear to
have only moderately positive nancial effects (Margolis and Elfenbein, 2008),
and effects vary greatly across industry sectors and rms (Vogel, 2005). In any
case, these nancially oriented studies invariably fail to address the theoretical
puzzle that they implicitly identify: Why do so many companies and managers
consider adopting CSR practices when much of the evidence points to few if
any nancial benets of doing so?
One theoretical approach, the stakeholder perspective, investigates the
actions of particular stakeholders, notably consumers, shareholders, and
employees, and company responses to them (Freeman, 1984). Stakeholders
are persons or groups that have, or claim, ownership, rights, or interests in a
corporation and its activities, past, present, or future (Clarkson, 1995:106).
Primary stakeholders, who are crucial for the basic survival and operation of
the company, include employees, investors, consumers, suppliers, and the
broader political unit or community that provides key infrastructure. Secondary stakeholders, such as the mass media and various interest and social movement groups, are not directly involved in company transactions but can be
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relevant to its operations by, for example, shaping public opinion (Clarkson,
1995; McAdam et al., 2010).
The stakeholder literature is mainly of two sorts: descriptive, identifying
the stakeholders involved, the claims they make, and the outcomes of disputes;
or prescriptive, urging management to heed activist stakeholders or implement
particular policies. However, stakeholder research ignores such fundamental
issues as why NGOs are seen as legitimate stakeholders, why their moral
claims take the forms that they do, or why consumers or shareholders would
value and reward responsible companies.
Such questions are discussed by a second theoretical approach, institutional theories, which attempt to gain purchase on the issue of the general
legitimacy and diffusion of CSR ideology and practices. The basic idea here is
simple: companies embedded in environments favorable to or promoting CSR
norms are more likely to act responsibly (Galaskiewicz, 1991; Levy and Kolk,
2002). Campbell (2006, 2007) proposes that companies are induced to adopt
CSR practices by the following institutional factors: systems of well-organized
state or industry self-regulation; monitoring by NGOs and the media; institutionalized CSR expectations in business education, publications, and associations; membership in business associations that are supportive of CSR; and
institutionalized dialogue with various stakeholders pushing CSR principles.
Both carrots and sticks are used to encourage responsible behavior and punish
or threaten to punish irresponsible behavior. Frequently, the focus is on explicit rewards and sanctions carried by formal (legislative or regulatory) enforcement agencies (Campbell, 2006).
Other institutional approaches, strongly cultural in emphasis, address
the more fundamental questions of where CSR ideology is rooted, why it
has become so prevalent, and why it has such expansive mobilizational capacity. The world-polity or world-society perspective stresses the role of global
frames and norms in constituting actors, shaping their identities, and offering
legitimated models of behavior (Boli, 2005; Boli and Thomas, 1999; Frank
et al., 2000; Meyer et al., 1997; Ramirez and McEneaney, 1997; Scott and
Christensen, 1995).
In this perspective, the foundation of CSR ideology is located in broad
cultural principles grounded in the global moral order. Most relevant here are
the principles involved in the construct of world citizenship. World citizenship
entails a model of the rights and duties of all individuals by virtue of their status as members of humanity (Boli, 1999). Rights are expressed in human rights
doctrines, now strongly institutionalized globally and much studied. World citizenship duties are much less studied, but they are crucial with regard to social
responsibility. To be a responsible, conscientious world citizen, in the ideology
of world culture, the individual must care for the natural environment, consume sustainably, ght injustice, aid the suffering, and so on. This legitimated
model draws on deeper principles of the global moral order, such as the
sacredness of the person, the imperative of justice, and the interdependence of
nature and humanity.
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Corporations are also subject to world citizenship ideology. They are not
citizens in the same sense as individuals so their rights are more circumscribed,
but as important actors in world society they must accept similar obligations.
Their inveterate tendency to serve only the interests of management or shareholders is unacceptably narrow because it can and does lead to great harm;
they are often seen as having a persistent tendency to violate human rights,
heighten inequality, undermine local cultures, and so on. As world citizens of
a sort, the world-cultural model insists, companies must become socially
responsible and minimize the damage they do, whether intended or not. In
short, they too must become morally upright and engaged actors attuned to
human suffering and concerned about a highly varied array of violations of
sacred entities.
When NGOs urge companies to adopt CSR principles and practices, then,
they are activating the global moral order and the world citizenship model it
supports. That they are not simply ignored, derided, or repressed is a tribute
to the extraordinary legitimacy NGOs absorb by rooting their claims in the
moral order. That they can shame companies into making changes in their
policies and practices testies to the authoritative character of that moral
order. NGOs promote models of the responsible individual, corporation, and
state as universally applicable and increasingly imperative (Keck and Sikkink,
1998; Khagram, 2004; Willetts, 1996). In Campbells terms, the global cultural
environment is ever more favorable toindeed, insistent uponthe adoption
of CSR practices by corporations. This global cultural shift has been gradually
intensifying over the past several decades.
Hence, the spread of world-cultural principles and the penetration of global models of the responsible world citizen have made CSR an ever clearer
moral obligation. Other forces have also contributed to the growing prominence of CSR, above all the increasingly transnational character of companies,
company operations, and knowledge about the impact of those operations
(Vogel, 2005), much of which is generated by globally oriented NGOs. Not
infrequently, negotiations between NGOs, states, and industry actors result in
institutional settlements implementing CSR logic for particular industries (e.g.,
timber) or regarding particular norm violations, such as child labor (Bartley,
2007). Carrots and sticks are again at work: NGOs and other moral entrepreneurs offer praise and legitimacy when companies do the right thing, but
they also wield a rather powerful club of potential de-legitimation via shaming
and negative publicity if companies do not conform to the global model of the
socially responsible actor (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram et al., 2002).
Once rms have adopted CSR policies, NGOs are wont to monitor them for
failures to live up to the policies. The charge of hypocrisy is not easily
deected, and what companies may originally have seen as inconsequential
rhetorical conformity tends to become increasingly problematic when the
rhetoric is not matched by action, a process that is analyzed in detail in norm
diffusion studies (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Risse et al., 1999).
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The conict diamonds campaign forcefully invoked responsibilities of

world citizenship with respect to the diamond industry, which was transformed
by a combination of moral teaching and encouragement, shaming and de-legitimizing efforts by NGOs, and formal enforcement mechanisms enacted by
states and given effectiveness by market forces.
IN-DEPTH CASE STUDY DATA

This article relies on an intensive, up-close-and-personal study of the
conict diamonds campaign and the Kimberley Process. Bieri conducted 24
in-depth interviews, most of them face to face, with prominent NGO campaigners, state ofcials (including the former U.S. Special Negotiator on Conict Diamonds, a former KP chairman from Canadas Department of Foreign
Affairs, and several chairs of KP working groups), and industry executives
(key personnel at De Beers, the Diamond High Council in Belgium, and the
World Diamond Council, the industry organization created to address the
conict diamonds issue), between May 2005 and July 2006. In addition, documents covering events related to conict diamonds, the campaign, and the KP
were analyzed. Documents came from the industry (De Beers, the World Diamond Council, Rapaport News, and National Jeweler Magazine), NGOs,
states, the KP itself, the United Nations, think tanks (e.g., the Global Policy
Institute and the World Peace Foundation), and governments (e.g., transcripts
of the U.S. Congressional Hearings on Conict Diamonds), along with innumerable news reports obtained from the Lexis-Nexis database and general
online searches.
Like any particular case, the diamond industry and the campaign against
conict diamonds have distinctive properties. Three such properties led to
especially rapid changes in the diamond business. First, diamonds are special
gifts of lasting signicance. The industry has gone to great lengths to enhance
the symbolic value of diamonds by tying them to courtship, love, and marriage. By the same token, such deeply rooted social meanings and traditions,
like the practice in the United States of presenting a diamond engagement
ring, are not easily disturbed by consumer campaigns. Still, this socially constructed meaning made diamonds particularly vulnerable to association with
images of severe suffering and deprivation. Other products like oil and copper
have been implicated in savage struggles for power, but as industrial necessities lacking links to sacred institutions or mythic ideologies, they are much
harder targets for moral activists.
Second, the centralization of the diamond industry gave the conict diamonds campaign two obvious targets: the dominant company, De Beers, and
the dominant trading center, Antwerp. But centralization is a two-edged sword
because the obvious targets are extremely powerful; De Beers has dominated
the diamond trade like no company in virtually any other industry. The
key issue here, then, is how NGOs were able to steer the massive De Beers
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juggernaut down a road not of its own choosing. Part of the answer lies in the
third distinctive characteristic: the conict diamonds problem involved exceptionally severe moral violations, far worse than abuses publicized in many
other campaigns. Failure to clean up the diamond trade could be construed as
harshly callous behavior by villainous corporate giants.
Despite these distinct properties, the conict diamonds case offers important general insights into how NGOs can translate CSR norms into more
responsible business practices for an entire global industry. We return to these
general insights after presenting some of the details of the conict diamonds
campaign and the Kimberley Process.
UNCOVERING MORAL VIOLATIONS: THE CONFLICT DIAMONDS

CAMPAIGN
Conict or blood diamonds are rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to nance armed conict aimed at undermining legitimate
governments5 (Kimberley Process Secretariat, 2008). Conict diamonds have
fueled calamitous civil wars in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, and Cote DIvoire. For most of the 1990s, the conict
diamonds issue went unnoticed. In 19981999, however, parallel efforts by a
few NGOs and the United Nations catapulted the issue onto the global stage.
The result was the Kimberley Process, a series of negotiations involving states,
NGOs, and industry but not the United Nations itself. With surprising speed,
the KP generated the KPCS to regulate the diamond trade by certifying that
diamonds are conict-free. Two and a half years is lightning speed by international negotiating standards (Smillie, 2006). Although the road to success
was by no means straight, the conict diamonds campaign moved unusually
quickly from raising concern about the problem to establishing a global mechanism to solve it.
At the heart of the campaign were accusations that De Beers and the
Antwerp trading center bore culpability for the brutal civil wars fueled by the
diamond trade. NGOs made these powerful actors aware of a new global
social problem and redened long-standing business practices as unacceptable.
That they were able to engage the industry and states relatively quickly was a
reection of the growing legitimacy and value of NGOs as moral guides;
industries worldwide were recognizing that it was better to engage with than
to ght NGOs.
The campaign efforts were facilitated by the general legitimacy of CSR
ideology, which increased greatly in the 1990s. The growth and pervasiveness
5
Of course, most rebel movements challenge the legitimacy of the governments they oppose, but
the KP singled out nonstate actors as the illegitimate culprits responsible for the blood diamonds problem, leaving aside the abusive use of diamond revenues by governments. As such,
the KPs denition of conict diamonds is an indication of the legitimacy of the nation-state
form, reinforcing and protecting state sovereignty and legitimacy.
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of CSR ideology in recent times has been documented by various scholars

(Aspen Institute, 2002; Rondinelli and London, 2003; Vogel, 2005). Vogel
(2005:5) gives striking evidence of widespread interest in and acceptance of
CSR norms.
A recent search on Google for corporate social responsibility found more than
30,000 sites. More than 15 million pages on the World Wide Web address dimensions
of corporate social responsibility, including more than 100,000 pages on corporate
websites. Amazon lists 600 books on the subject. More than 1,000 corporations have
developed or signed codes of conduct governing dimensions of their social, environmental, and human rights practices, and more than 2,000 rms now issue reports on their
CSR practices.
Many global organizations institutionalize CSR principles, such as the

U.N. Global Compact, the International Business Leaders Forum, and Social
Accountability International and its SA 8000 standards. In addition, a plethora of surveys have found evidence of growing CSR expectations among consumers (Rondinelli and London, 2003). Obviously, opposition to CSR persists,
particularly among neoliberal economists (e.g., Booth, 2009); in the early
stages of norm construction, contestation is often high (Finnemore and
Sikkink, 1998; Risse et al., 1999), but norms can be powerful even when
contested, and their power is normally directly correlated with the prevalence
of violations brought to public attention. For CSR norms, violation reporting
is increasingly widespread and intense.
In a general sense, growing acceptance of CSR norms is due to economic
and cultural forces of globalization (Vogel, 2005). States are deemed increasingly unable to police transnational corporations effectively. At the same time,
companies have become more vulnerable to civil-society campaigns, especially
those companies that have high-prole global brands. Coupled with the emergence of world citizenship obligations that expand the responsibilities of companies and NGOs, these factors have produced a fertile breeding ground for
the global expansion of CSR norms.
Moreover, companies have come to believe that doing good can mean
doing well, however dubious that connection may be empirically. According
to Vogel (2005), 70% of business executives think that CSR is benecial to the
bottom line, as a result of three processes. First, claims about the virtues of
the triple bottom line have been widely disseminated in books, popular
media treatments, and ofcial documents, such as the European Unions
White Paper on CSR (Meozzi, 2002). Second, managers who have struggled
with conicting norms regarding prots and philanthropy nd that the triple
bottom line principle allows them to resolve this conict. Third, managers
have learned that CSR makes sense by observing the success of high-prole
companies that have made responsibility a keystone of their operations, such
as the Body Shop and Ben and Jerrys.
Apart from these general trends, two specic factors contributed crucially
to the positive engagement of the diamond industry with the norms embedded
in the KPCS. These factors constitute concrete mechanisms by which the
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diffuse principles of CSR as world-cultural ideology were brought home to

roost in the diamond industry. First, social movement organizations in the
conict diamonds campaign dened and pushed the new norms about the
responsibilities of the industry, dramatizing their position by publicizing vivid
images associating diamonds with destruction. Second, some key industry and
state gures were particularly receptive to CSR thinking; as forward-looking
leaders, they pulled more reluctant industry and state players into the process.
Global CSR Norms: Opportunities for the Conict Diamonds Campaign

CSR ideology provided a favorable climate in which the conict diamonds issue could ourish. Several key developments lead to this conclusion.
The rst NGO report that sought to put conict diamonds on the global
agenda, A Rough Trade (Global Witness, 1998), accused De Beers of buying
conict diamonds in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1173,
which had been passed in June 1998. A Rough Trade framed Angolan conict
diamonds squarely in terms of unacceptable corporate conduct rather than as
an international relations or Angolan peace issue. It portrayed De Beers as
irresponsible, nontransparent, and unethical. Global Witness, the tiny, lowbudget NGO that prepared the report, exhorted De Beers to heed its own
code of conduct, which could readily be interpreted as disallowing the trade in
conict diamonds. De Beers was singled out as the dominant rm and standard-setter in the industry. It is time that a business which operates in an
arcane way, like a family business, re-assess its operation and accepts that corporate accountability is now an important factor in international business.
The South African-British group De Beers and its Central Selling Organisation
(CSO), as the major player in the diamonds trade, must assume signicant
responsibility for this (Global Witness, 1998:2). The report concludes that it
is encouraging to note that De Beers do have pre-existing corporate statements
on ethics and transparency, and so Global Witness challenges De Beers to
tackle this complicated and necessary process of change to drag the diamond
business into the next century and ensure that key issues of concern such as
public scrutiny, accountability and ethical consideration are put in place
(Global Witness, 1998:15). Global Witness thus invoked global CSR principles
and shamed De Beers for not abiding by them. De Beers was behind the
timesit was not keeping up with the world-cultural model of the responsible
corporate citizen. Precisely because De Beers had previously portrayed itself as
a progressive and responsible leader in the industry and had formally committed itself to CSR practices, it was an obvious target for NGOs pushing new
normative concerns.
Meanwhile, the consumer-oriented arm of the campaign developed rapidly. Put together by a coalition of mostly small NGOs under the name Fatal
Transactions, the campaign focused on the consumers right to know, thus
targeting diamond retailers. Fatal Transactions was not the rst such effort;
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previous consumer awareness campaigns had targeted furs, the hunting of

baby seals, and so on. Consumer awareness campaigns, including boycotts,
had become an important political tool, despite uncertainty about the effects
of such activism on corporate behavior (Davidson et al., 1995; Evans, 2000;
Micheletti, 2003; Smith, 1990). Precisely because many consumers were already
sensitized to care, NGOs efforts to recast the symbolism of the industry
were not likely to be ignored. Such symbolic de-legitimation was clearly linked
to potential material consequences: declining sales and falling prots. In the
conict diamonds case, however, a boycott was not pursued due to concern
about the negative effects on diamond miners.6 The goal was not to reduce
sales but to prompt prospective customers to accept only conict-free diamonds. Of course, heightened consumer awareness may seem tantamount to a
boycott, particularly when no alternative products or brands are available, but
most of the NGOs activities targeted policymakers and industry ofcials
rather than consumers. The primary purpose of the consumer awareness campaign was to keep governments and industry worried about a potential drop
in demand.
The strategy seems to have worked. While the vast majority of consumers
remained completely ignorant, De Beers became gravely concerned about the
possibility of a boycott. As the companys Head of Public Affairs, Andrew
Bone (2005), recalled: We were concerned that the way the NGOs were putting it at the time was that this was a consumer awareness campaign. Now we
knew that with the complexity of the issue, it was too complex for a message
to get across to the public in a way that would not alarm them, and therefore
instigate a boycott.
That the rupture regarding the symbolic character of diamonds was deep
and wide is indicated by the extreme violations of sacred entities (individuals,
groups, peoples) publicized by the campaign. The civil wars involved indiscriminate rape, mutilation, and massacre of civilians, particularly women and
children, and the forced soldiering of children. Many human rights and principles of law were severely transgressed, and the Fatal Transactions campaign
depicted companies and states engaged in the diamond industry as aiding and
abetting the transgressors. The Sierra Leone war was especially vicious, magnifying the moral responsibilities of the industry. Firsthand observation of the
brutal realities of the war prompted some politicians and industry leaders to
urge industry action. Martin Rapaport, perhaps the biggest name in U.S. jewelry diamonds, was sufciently moved by a trip to Sierra Leone to become a
key proponent of change. Most telling about Rapaports reaction is that, in
the article he published after that journey, Guilt Trip (Rapaport, 2000), he
argued not only that the industry must cooperate fully with states and the
United Nations to address the problem, but also that the industry was responsible for ending the war regardless of the cost. Rapaports trip was prompted
6
A small number of NGOs favored a boycott, but the main NGO coalitions, Fatal Transactions
in Europe and the Campaign to Eliminate Conict Diamonds in the United States, explicitly
distanced themselves from an outright boycott.
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by the concerns raised by NGOs and it had the best outcome they could have
hoped for: his willing embrace of the industrys social responsibility to end
great harm. Winning over Rapaport helped the NGOs greatly in their efforts
to bring pressure to bear on more reluctant parties.
Early initial support from proactive state representatives was also crucial
to the search for a solution to the conict diamonds problem. These governmental allies of the NGO campaign, including Canadian Ambassador Bob
Fowler at the United Nations, House of Representatives member Tony Hall
in the United States, U.S. Special Negotiator for Conict Diamonds J. D.
Bindenagel, and the European Unions Kim Eling, helped create a sense of
urgency about conict diamonds. Numerous other state representatives in the
KP were essential to the success of the negotiations, particularly the rst two
chairmen of the KP, Abbey Chikane of South Africa and Tim Martin of
Canada. Notwithstanding the importance of such gures, it appears that
governments largely were impelled by nonstate actors to address the issue of
conict diamonds. A key case in point is U.S. involvement. Ian Smillie of the
small NGO Partnership Africa Canada, the man who is often described as
the key architect of the KP, put it this way: It was really because the
American jewelry industry was so scared of what would happen if there wasnt
an agreement that they pushed the government to do the right thing. NGOs
pushed the industry. Industry pushed the government (Smillie, 2006).
Judging by the response of De Beers, the NGOs, though annoying and
potentially harmful, were not seen as illegitimate interlopers imposing misguided morality on the industry. Their cultural authority is further evident in
the fact that De Beers decided not to launch a counterattack on the NGOs as
being uninformed, incapable, or simply wrong. One of the authors of a report
on Sierra Leone, Heart of the Matter (Partnership Africa Canada, 2000), later
acknowledged that several claims in the report were inaccurate. De Beers had
previously sued other groups for disseminating damaging or false information,
but it refrained from litigation regarding the conict diamonds reports and no
evidence suggests that it even seriously considered this option. De Beers did
dispute some facts, such as the estimate that conict diamonds were 20% of
the trade, but it never tried to vilify or de-legitimate these groups.
Remarkably enough, De Beers perceived the NGOs as potential and credible threats. Consider the paradox: a rm that had tightly controlled the diamond industry for decades felt unable to ignore a handful of small NGOs
publishing reports that were not even widely disseminated in the popular
media at the time. The consumer awareness campaign, meanwhile, was gaining
little traction; customers were not habitually asking jewelers about the link
between diamonds and village massacres in Sierra Leone. The threat that they
might do so was real enough, however, and the combination of the consumer
awareness campaign and the moral exhortation of the NGOs, backed by careful documentation of horrors that could be laid at the door of the diamond
industry, impelled positive engagement by the industry. The NGOs were dening a new form of irresponsibility relative to the diamond trade and, thus, a
515
new social responsibility to be met by diamond companies as morally

obligated world citizens.
Business Associations and Conict Diamonds

Some researchers suggest that business associations, such as chambers of
commerce, promote the spread of CSR (Campbell, 2006; Galaskiewicz, 1991;
Levy and Kolk, 2002). Firms that are more heavily involved in business associations and interact more frequently with their peers are more likely to
engage positively with CSR. Moreover, even if individual companies remain
skeptical that social responsibility adds to the bottom line, business associations and inuential companies within a sector can create a pro-CSR environment at the industry level. This was certainly true in the conict diamonds
case. The diamond trade is characterized by tightly knit networks and frequent
meetings around the world. The meetings of two industry associationsthe
International Diamond Manufacturers Association and the World Federation
of Diamond Boursesprovided institutional opportunities for educating the
industry about conict diamonds and the importance of the Kimberley Process. Through these two bodies and a third association, the World Diamond
Council (WDC), which was created by the two industry organizations in 2000
expressly to deal with the conict diamonds issue, De Beers and other leaders
put considerable pressure on other companies to take action. Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers, delivered a key speech to the WDC in 2002,
stressing corporate responsibility and the moral rectitude of swift action. We
must continue our efforts to help bring the trade in conict diamonds to an
end. Not just because it has the potential to damage our industry and the
integrity of diamonds, but because it is right to do so. We are the leaders of
the industry and have a clear duty to the societies in which we operate to act,
and act effectively (Oppenheimer, 2002).
De Beers motivations were shaped by several forces. As the diamond
industry leader, it had the most to lose from a drop in demand, so fending off
a damaging public awareness campaign or boycott was essential. In addition,
De Beers had been singled out by NGOs for public shaming; the NGOs
decried the mismatch between the companys CSR promises and its inaction
regarding conict diamonds. De Beers internal corporate strategy also
affected its response to the campaign. Growing competition in the 1990s from
diamond mining operations in Russia, Australia, and Canada had undercut
the once rock-solid domination De Beers enjoyed in the global market. De
Beers therefore was suspected of supporting the KPCS as a way of reestablishing its domination. However, its market share continued to decline even after
the KPCS came into effect (Royal Bank of Canada, 2009), and there is no evidence that the KPCS has been disproportionately benecial for De Beers.
More likely, a less conspiratorial process was at work. Partly in response to its
declining market share, at around the time of the campaign and the initiation
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of the KP, De Beers began restructuring its business operations to enter the
retail market, which impelled it to give more attention to brand name recognition and reputation among consumers. Reputational risk was increasing, so
regulatory certication of virtue was more attractive.
The World Diamond Councils push for greater transparency, responsibility, and regulation of the diamond trade was not an easy sell in an industry
that had long operated with practically no regulation. The president of the
WDC, Eli Izhakoff, discussed the difculty of having one organization represent the entire industry on matters of conict diamonds.
Very, very difcult but because of the aim and the purpose we managed to bring everyone together because basically everybody realized that its in their interest to stick with
one voice it was initially a little bit more difcult because people werent aware of
what we are talking about and they said diamonds dont kill. A lot of people say what
do you want from us? What have we done bad? Why dont you go out after the
arms dealers? Why dont you go after the timber or whatever? So we, of course, had to
do explaining but once we explained I think everybody came on board. (Izhakoff 2005)
Mark van Bockstael, the representative of the Antwerp Diamond High

Council in the KP, had this to say about how NGO campaign pressures
helped prompt the industry to unite within the WDC:
Well, you should not forget that people in the industry were extremely afraid that the
NGOs were actually going to take their campaign to fruition or something. And that
would have destroyed the livelihood of quite a number of people that are active in the
diamond business. So these [industry] people they didnt object to anything at all. The
only objective that they had was make sure that the NGOs are not going to launch
their campaign. Thats it. And that was a very simple thing and we, to be honest we
got a, and Im not saying that we got a carte blanche or something, thats much of it,
but all the big players obviously, that means De Beers, HRD, Rio Tinto, the big mining
organization also the diamond banks, all of these said you have to do this. (Van
Bockstael, 2005)
Lending support to institutional theories of corporate social responsibility

(Bartley, 2003; Campbell, 2006; Galaskiewicz, 1991), the conict diamonds
case shows that the growth in CSR practices was affected by both a bottomup social movement campaign and a densely organized, pro-CSR industry
environment promoted by the key business associations and facilitated by the
leadership of De Beers. The key factor in the latter development, however,
was not industry leaders per se but the NGOs who brought the companies
unimpeachable evidence of moral violations occurring in parts of Africa where
diamond resources were at stake.
TRANSLATING NORMS INTO PRACTICE: THE KIMBERLEY

PROCESS
Ever since its inception, the Kimberley Process has been a fully tripartite
endeavor, engaging states, NGOs, and the industry. This multistakeholder
arrangement is not a facade obscuring behind-the-scenes domination by the
517
industry or major states. NGOs have participated vigorously in all aspects of

the KP, including plenary meetings, working groups, and country review visits.
Their inuenceand often leading rolein the process is well documented by
Bieri (2010).
The issue of legitimacy is crucial in explaining the willingness of states
and the industry to allow nongovernmental actors to become so heavily
engaged in the KP. Practical considerations helped: the NGOs came to be seen
as valuable experts in KP working groups, and in many ways they have proven themselves more knowledgeable about the conict diamonds issue than
any other party. But states have also learned that a formal role for NGOs
lends the Kimberley Process Certication Scheme greater legitimacy and
enhanced moral standing, as a quote from the former KP Chairman illustrates.
I think it [NGO and industry participation] is essential to the functioning of the Kimberley Process system and I think this is a characteristic of the new diplomacy that
well see with respect to emerging international challenges . Something else I would
add, and I dont think is always recognized but we see this in the operations of the
Kimberley Process, is that Partnership Africa Canada and Global Witness have deep
understanding, knowledge, and bring a lot of technical and analytical assets to the
Kimberley Process. So its not a situation where its, were being impelled by civil
society affecting public opinionalthough it does that, and thats healthybut civil
society participates in an integrated, informed, professional, technical way as well.
(Martin, 2005)
Even reluctant states understand that the Schemes reputation as a mechanism that effectively curbs the trade in conict diamonds is crucial to assure
consumers that diamonds are clean. Obviously, the NGOs inuence in the
KP far exceeds their material resources, and their involvement has been not
only tolerated but welcomed, not least because they have shown such deep
commitment to the success of the KP by devoting themselves so wholeheartedly to it.
NGO strengths include their legitimacy, dense networks, technical expertise, and knowledge of the issues (Yaziji, 2004). These strengths can benet
companies and international organizations, like the KP, which associate themselves with NGOs. The legitimacy of NGOs as the conscience of the world
(Willetts, 1996) provides a favorable opportunity for companies faced with
global campaigns criticizing their operations; developing partnerships with
NGOs holds the promise of achieving a better social responsibility image.
Companies can bask in the glow of NGOs moral legitimacy, which is rooted
in world-cultural assumptions about the virtues of NGOs as global champions
of the poor, the suffering, and the excluded. Through NGO links, companies
can show their commitment to universal rights and the rule of law. In turn, as
self-appointed guardians promoting the universal protection of individuals
from abuses, NGOs hold companies responsible for their commitments, while
at the same time questioning the sincerity of companies motivations. This
legitimacy framework helps explain the striking growth of multistakeholder
initiatives.
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By the same token, a considerable body of skeptics questions the intentions, claims, and doings of NGOs. Some scholars focus on NGOs ineffectiveness in promoting their normative goals (Clark et al., 1998; Hulme and
Edwards, 1997). Others question NGOs distinctiveness, depicting them as
interest groups pursuing not only moral principles but also objective interests
in much the same way that prot-oriented businesses do (Prakash and Sell,
2004). Still others point to the absence of accountability mechanisms in the
NGO sector (Brown and Moore, 2001; Jepson, 2005). Cooley and Ron (2002),
for instance, viewing NGOs from a rational actor perspective, suggest that, far
from contributing to the democratization and growth of global civil society,
NGOs help create a dysfunctional global political environment characterized
by competition, insecurity, and uncertainty. Despite such critiques, NGOs
remain the primary legitimation cloak to whose tails corporations and states
can cling as they seek to burnish their identities as responsible world citizens
concerned about world problems and open to civil society input (Rondinelli
and London, 2003; Yaziji, 2004).
The rising legitimacy of CSR as a world-cultural complex, documented by
a range of scholars (Bartley, 2003; Campbell, 2007; Vogel, 2005), also provides
opportunities to NGOs. They can latch on to progressive industry leaders to
put pressure on less enthusiastic rms by claiming that socially responsible
actions make business sense, even if the claim is questionable. Several recent
collaborations between companies and NGOs show that dominant industry
players (e.g., Nike, Coca-Cola) often feel obliged to match their leading role
in the market with leadership on CSR matters, setting the tone for the rest of
the industry (Levi and Linton, 2003; Rondinelli and London, 2003; Taylor
and Scharlin, 2004). However, research on the effects of CSR on protability
yields mixed results: scholars continue to debate whether CSR adds to or
harms the nancial bottom line of corporations and society at large (Henderson, 2001; Kyle and Ruggie, 2005; Porter and Kramer, 2006; Reich, 2007;
Robinson, 2002).
Still, the notion that prots and social responsibility go hand-in-hand aids
campaigns in pitching their messages toward wider company audiences. The
lack of a clear negative effect of CSR commitments on prots means that, on
the one hand, NGOs can argue that they are not asking rms to sacrice by
improving their behavior. On the other hand, the lack of a clear positive effect
means that NGOs can avoid engendering criticism from other NGOs for being
too close for comfort (Hulme and Edwards, 1997) by helping rms improve
the bottom line. NGOs can skeptically but honestly present the lack of clear
effects of CSR on protability as a way to bring companies on board while
also preserving their legitimacy.
In many cases, companies under re have had experience with NGOs on
previous occasions, which usually makes it easier for NGOs to engage them
on new issues. Initial company reactions can be rather dire; they may see
NGOs as extremists and imagine worst-case scenarios that threaten their very
existence. Once over this hurdle, however, they often nd that NGOs are
519
highly professional, knowledgeable, and even constructive in their criticism. In

the conict diamonds case, De Beers and progressive key gures such as
Rapaport and Izhakoff relatively early on detected NGO campaign efforts
and, despite initial misgivings, soon engaged and pulled the rest of the industry in with them. The positive experience in the KP made the industry receptive to the follow-up campaign, the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI),
though this initiative has far more ambitious goals and its progress is bound
to be slow. The initiative seeks to address the severe poverty of artisanal diamond miners, a root cause of violence and conict in mining areas. The DDI
is supported by various NGOs, including Global Witness and PAC; a range of
industry players, notably De Beers, the Rapaport Group, Tiffany and Co.,
Rio Tinto, and BHP Billiton; and the governments of Sweden and Canada, as
well as many of the diamond-producing states in central and western Africa.
Overall, engagement with NGOs exposes rms and their leaders more fully
to global cultural principles of world citizenship that entail numerous concerns not directly related to prot making. NGOs thereby nourish CSR
norms both in breadth and in depth, initially by increasing the number of
actors committed to CSR principles and later by extending the normative
structure to include an ever more widely dened set of obligations, such as
the expansion of concern from blood diamonds to poverty diamonds. A
spiral of moral responsibility can unfold, opening up even more opportunities
for civil society input. On diamond trade matters, two moral spirals are
unfolding, providing NGOs inroads to further shape industry and state
action. First, in the wake of the industrys formal commitment to resolve the
conict diamonds problem, NGOs began to press for improved working conditions in the diamond mines. Effective framing (Snow and Benford, 1988;
Finnemore and Sikking, 1998; Tarrow, 2001) of this issue, as a matter of
conict resolution and sustainable peace, has facilitated this expansion of
moral responsibility in the diamond industry. The question is whether there
may be a tipping point at which CSR-committed corporations experience a
backlash from shareholders or management. At this point it is too early to
speculate where the spread of CSR norms may lead the private sector as a
whole, but it does not appear that the diamond industry has reached such a
tipping point yet.
The second spiral is the NGO effort to get all states in the KP to adopt
and enforce morally responsible trading practices. Effective implementation at
the national level is most frequently hampered by weak technical capacity and
incompetent or corrupt governance; this is particularly true in many of the
former conict-riddled areas of western Africa. Yet these states are responsible
for KPCS implementation and must submit quarterly trade statistics and
production data. When discrepancies are uncovered, NGOs are quick to
shame the rulebreakers, reminding them that they have committed themselves
to making the regulatory regime watertight. But some KPCS violations are
more intentional: Zimbabwe and Venezuela have illegally mined and smuggled
diamonds into the KPCS pipeline for years, with few repercussions from
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fellow KP member states. Mirroring similar ndings in the norm diffusion

literature (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram et al., 2002), these states
cannot be brought into compliance because their leaders, Robert Mugabe and
Hugo Chavez, explicitly do not seek global legitimacy. As a result, NGOs
have begun to criticize other KP members for their complacency, urging them
to exert pressure in a way similar to Keck and Sikkinks (1998) well-known
boomerang effect. NGOs have even threatened to de-legitimate the KP as a
whole, should action against violators not be taken. Thus, while new norms
about ethical diamond trading have diffused globally via broad participation
in the KP, implementation in local spaces is hardly perfect. Because of the
(still rather rare) failures in domestic enforcement, normative pressures continue to matter.
Regularly occurring multistakeholder dialogue facilitates the adoption of
CSR principles in several ways. As Campbell (2006:934, 935) explains:
Changes in the deep-seated, taken-for-granted assumptions of managers in
the utility or appropriateness of socially responsible behavior may stem from
ongoing forms of dialogue between managers and stakeholders in which the
interests of ordinarily antagonistic parties are often redened, and
actorsincluding corporate managersbegin to expand what they believe to
be feasible environmentally responsible practices. Scholars have typically
studied legal environments and institutions that mandate such dialogue (e.g.,
Europes corporatism, Japans labor laws, or environmental regulation in the
United States). We also see it at work in the KP meetings, where tripartite
negotiations emerged voluntarily. Both corporate managers and state ofcials
found their interests being redened through dialogue with the NGOs. So,
too, did the NGOs, who came to realize that the success of the KP depended
on total engagement, at the cost of other campaigns and goals and despite
criticism from civil society peers about cooptation.
In contrast to Bartley (2003), who nds that social movements operating
within the institutional context of neoliberalism and free trade yielded private
self-regulatory schemes in the apparel and tropical timber industries, in the
conict diamonds case we nd that world citizenship norms and expectations
about responsible business practices led to a formal regulatory framework.
Unlike apparel or timber, however, the diamond industry is highly concentrated, thus making it much easier for the conict diamonds campaign to
target the entire industry. Unlike voluntary codes of conduct at the rm
level, the KP undergirds CSR commitments with concrete enforcement mechanisms. State regulation implies that companies cannot simply embrace ethical principles; they are obligated to abide by national laws and KP
standards. Similarly, it became evident early on that the KP could not be
used as an easy advertising tag for rogue states seeking an international
human rights certicate. Recent developments regarding Zimbabwe, where
KPCS violations have brought yet another opportunity to highlight the
repressive misdeeds of the Mugabe regime, suggest that KP membership
may entail more rather than less human rights scrutiny. Given the heavy
521
dependence on diamond production in some states, particularly Botswana

and the war-torn states themselves, a formalized, legislation-based scheme
could nd backing relatively easily. Crucial, however, were small, less
diamond-dependent states, above all Canada, that became strong moral
advocates. This rather unique combination of factors helped counter global
pressures favoring trade liberalization and the hands-off ideology that has
been prime economic wisdom in recent decades.
In the KP, the diamond industry actively sought and helped design state
regulatory mechanisms; self-regulation is only a supplemental feature of the
system. Key industry players, under pressure from NGOs, sought to bring
states into the negotiations as regulatory enforcers. State regulation was thus
not a last resort, coming only after self-regulation had failed while NGO
outrage persisted. Early on, the World Diamond Council believed that state
regulation was necessary to arrive at an effective solution so it did not seek
to minimize costs or avoid stringent and independent oversight. These developments are consistent with ndings in the literature on market regulationcompanies favor regulation when they expect to benet from it
(Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000; Jenkins, 2001)but that view tells only part
of the story. Beyond material motivations, a key driving force behind the
eventual creation of the KPCS was the moral fervor of small, weak NGOs
insisting that world citizenship obligations applied fully to the diamond
industry.
More recently, we nd similar evidence of NGO-industry alignment in
their calls for more state action. Specically, pressures are mounting, especially
from the NGOs but also from several key voices in the industry, to suspend
Zimbabwe from the KP. NGOs reported in late 2008 that the Mugabe military
had murdered around 200 miners in the Marange mining area, and massive
violence and human rights abuses in other diamond areas have been documented as well. Two leading participants in the KP have left the process to
protest the KPs inability to deal effectively with Zimbabwe. NGO representative Ian Smillie from PAC left the KP in June 2009, and Martin Rapaport,
the prominent diamond trading gure, resigned from the WDC in February
2010. Rapaport turned to social movement tactics by going on a hunger strike
during the KP intersessional meeting in June 2010, to protest inaction regarding Zimbabwe. However, thus far the consensus principle, which requires a
unanimous vote to suspend a KP member state, has prevented action with
regard to Zimbabwe. Several states, most notably South Africa, Angola,
Namibia, Brazil, and Russia, have come to Zimbabwes defense, while the
United States, the European Union, and Canada want to require Zimbabwe
to undertake serious reforms. Despite the inability of nonstate actors to move
the KP to action on this matter, these developments show that NGOs and
moral leaders from both industry and states are maintaining pressure on the
KP, reminding it that its moral legitimacy is in danger if it fails to enforce
fully the new norms for global diamond trading that are the KPs very raison
detre.
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CONCLUSION
Our analysis of the conict diamonds case suggests that corporate social
responsibility has three main aspects. First, world-cultural ideology increasingly institutionalizes expectations for socially responsible behavior by companies, especially prominent ones, through the construct of world citizenship.
Second, having considerable moral legitimacy as champions of the downtrodden and neglected, NGOs are a prime source of stimulus and guidance for
CSR behavior. Third, to be effective, CSR campaigns must involve multistakeholder engagement; without the support of states, NGOs are not likely to
make much headway with global rms.
Abiding by KPCS standards does not necessarily indicate strong CSR
commitment on the part of the industrythe KPCS is practically compulsory
because participants may trade only with each otherbut KP certication is
well on its way to becoming a taken-for-granted obligation for companies and
states. The recent chorus of disapproval regarding the KPs inaction with
respect to Zimbabwe shows just that: even when not directly related to civil
war, KPCS noncompliance is deemed unethical and evokes reactions from
both inside and outside the KP. The conict diamonds campaign and the KP
thereby have produced a new social responsibility: avoiding even wholly unintentional and indirect nancing of rebel movements and civil wars. Peripheral
outsiders, the small NGOs that became stakeholders only because they felt
the moral imperative to act, became insiders in this previously impenetrable
business. The KPCS is all the more remarkable because it involved the industry in a mechanism that mandates national legislation and regular monitoring
in which NGOs are fully engaged. In the end, coercive state regulation is the
enforcement stick to ensure industry compliance, but the industry itself helped
carve the stick and hand it over to states.
As a tripartite regulatory framework, the KP displays two key features
that are conducive to socially responsible behavior by states and private diamond traders. Most important, CSR principles created through frank negotiations among multiple stakeholders enjoy greater credibility and are more likely
to affect company and state behavior. Second, reliable monitoring mechanisms
are important to ensure compliance. The KP includes semi-independent monitoring that allows NGOs to examine compliance through both internal mechanisms and externally generated reports on country violations. So far, NGO
monitoring has been quite effective in identifying compliance problems and
engaging the industry and states to take action, but NGOs have also lamented
the slow pace of progress and occasional lack of action, especially since 2007
and in particular regarding the gridlock on Zimbabwe.
On the other hand, the broader effectiveness of CSR commitments in the
diamond industry is far from clear. De Beers has a comprehensive CSR program, expressing policies and describing actions to care for the environment,
avoid corrupt practices, prevent child labor, and so on (De Beers Group,
2007). However, other major players, such as Israeli diamond companies and
523
the giant Russian producer Alrosa, indicate almost no social concern or

engagement (Alrosas annual reports for 2006 and 2007 do not even mention
the conict diamonds issue). National differences are considerable in many
CSR areas and they are not easily explained; this issue is more than ripe for
systematic research.
The diamond industry may continue to ignore certain outsider stakeholders and the issues they present, but no company can claim ignorance about
the victims of blood diamonds. A well-articulated global normative environment guides proper behavior and highly institutionalized processes ensure
compliance rather effectively. This result is a striking example of the operation
of globally constituted moral authority articulated by NGOs and enacted by
powerful companies and states for whom CSR principles have much more
than mere rhetorical signicance. CSR is the articulation of the world citizenship obligations of companies, and both companies and states recognize that
they ignore them at their own peril.
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Trading Diamons Responsibly

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 26, No.

Trading Diamonds Responsibly: Institutional

Department of Sociology, University of Maryland University College Europe, ImBosseldorn 30,

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love; they became conict diamonds or blood diamonds, linked to village

Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

smuggle diamonds into the KP pipeline via neighboring countries, particularly

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Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

of the norm development process, from norm innovation to maturation: they

THEORIZING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

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Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

Bieri and Boli

Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

The conict diamonds campaign forcefully invoked responsibilities of

IN-DEPTH CASE STUDY DATA

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UNCOVERING MORAL VIOLATIONS: THE CONFLICT DIAMONDS

Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

of CSR ideology in recent times has been documented by various scholars

Many global organizations institutionalize CSR principles, such as the

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diffuse principles of CSR as world-cultural ideology were brought home to

Global CSR Norms: Opportunities for the Conict Diamonds Campaign

Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

previous consumer awareness campaigns had targeted furs, the hunting of

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Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

new social responsibility to be met by diamond companies as morally

Business Associations and Conict Diamonds

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Mark van Bockstael, the representative of the Antwerp Diamond High

Lending support to institutional theories of corporate social responsibility

TRANSLATING NORMS INTO PRACTICE: THE KIMBERLEY

Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

industry or major states. NGOs have participated vigorously in all aspects of

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Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

highly professional, knowledgeable, and even constructive in their criticism. In

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fellow KP member states. Mirroring similar ndings in the norm diffusion

Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

dependence on diamond production in some states, particularly Botswana

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Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

the giant Russian producer Alrosa, indicate almost no social concern or

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Institutional Explanations for Corporate Social Responsibility

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Shamir, Ronen. 2004. The De-Radicalization of Corporate Social Responsibility, Critical

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