Lax Privatisation from Lax Governance

Abstract

The retreat of the state has been a feature of the modern global landscape since the Reaganite era of the 1980s but it seems to be gathering pace at the present. Thus one admired concept that is having a new lease of life is that of privatisation. The main idea that is benevolent is to reduce the costs of the state and authorise people to do their own jobs. But there have been deviations in reality. We have always heard of government officials getting the responsibility of the so-called privatised jobs in a formal auction and in this way earning money. Another sort of not really good governance relates to authorising manufacturers in some countries to test the quality of their own and their rivals products. In order to outflank the legal burdens the manufacturers install a laboratory mostly near or even inside their own territories with a separate name and they put their own workers there to handle the job. So the result is at best not very reliable, especially for the rivals who find their products rejected. Social responsibility deals with customer issues as one of the main stakeholders. And privatisation in this form is predicated in corruption and as such is opposed to social responsibility.

Citation

Seifi, S. and Crowther, D. (2015), "Lax Privatisation from Lax Governance", Sustainability After Rio (Developments in Corporate Governance and Responsibility, Vol. 8), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 221-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2043-052320150000008010