| Summary: | This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Arts degree in Anthropology === This study focuses on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Steelworx a multinational conglomerate which sets itself in South Africa’s Steel Valley. Due to an issue of current debate on the newly emerging powers in the field of resource exploitation in Africa, framed in terms of their national identities as new players; (China and India). The emergence of Asian owned investments has been met with much scepticism and indifference in some quarters. Mining corporations in South Africa have generally been guilty of unethical practices and co-opting workers into a system which allows investors to go unscathed due to their failures to ethical responsibilities and causing a great deal of suffering. I look at the adverse effects on the livelihood of workers and community members and the intervention by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). With an objective to uncover how CSR unfolds and deals with suffering in the Steelworx as an Indian owned operation. I map out the daily lives of some of the afflicted workers and members of the community using critical ethnography. I also look at the diverse agents and local conditions (the economic and political landscape) that enable their interaction/ interplay with workers, the unions, communities and compensation laws when exercising their social responsibility. This study shows that Steelworx’s takeover from a racialized operation has a set of different priorities in embarking their CSR mandate, CSR is used as a marketing ploy, while philanthropic gestures are made, the company ignores the much pertinent aspects of the community where its operations in and where they have meted out harm, further exacerbating poverty and suffering. Government has absolved its power and the fate of the workers and community has been left in the hands of the MNC, bringing about contentious questions of how far the government mandate should go in looking after its citizens. The company has engaged itself in constant running battles with community and pressure groups as an indication that CSR is failing where the company is producing harm. === MT 2018
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