Die Hard: The Changing Role of the Nation-State in the Making

This paper investigates the interplay between transnational and local (here South Korean) dynamics around CSR. In this paper, I pay particular attention to the role of the nation-state in the emergence and evolution of CSR as a transnational organizational field. The recent transnational governance literature has paid particular attention to the role and growing power of non-state actors – both private and civil society actors (Djelic & Quack, 2010; Faulconbridge & Muzio, 2011; Morgan & Kubo, 2010; Morgan & Quack, 2005; Ramirez, 2010). As the current transnational governance literature focuses on depicting the ways in which non-state actors have contributed to the emergence and evolution of transnational governance, it could tend to argue that the size and clout of nation-states have shrunk or even disappeared in parallel. A number of contributions in political science have argued that, in reality, nation-states have not completely gone away, but that they have instead necessarily been changing with respect to their role and place as new forms of public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder governance platforms have imposed themselves (Djelic & Sahlin, 2012; Strange, 1996). In order to shed new light on the changing role of nation-states in the context of transnational governance, this chapter explores the re-invented role and place of nation-states in the transnational governance context. The role of a nation-state with the status of a middle power, South Korea, is a key theme for that first chapter. Despite the growing visibility and role of middle powers in international relations (Bradford, 2015), we do not know much about their involvement in processes of transnational governance. This chapter shows that states have not disappeared or retreated, but remain significant actors in the context of transnational governance dynamics. Moreover, it documents how a middle power nation-state can play an important role in contemporary transnational governance dynamics.