This chapter explores the intersection of jurisdictional arbitrage and geopolitics by examining how US-based CCMCEs structure their domestic and international operations. Drawing on CORPLINK data from the world’s top 100 non-financial firms, it identifies a distinct bifurcation in US corporate structuring: minimal use of intermediary or splitter subsidiaries within the United States and extensive use of such structures abroad. While domestic operations leverage Delaware’s legal infrastructure without intermediaries, international operations are frequently routed through offshore financial centres, enabling regulatory and tax arbitrage. The chapter argues that this structural asymmetry reflects more than corporate tax planning – it reveals how arbitrage is embedded in broader geopolitical strategies. Through permissive laws, ambiguous enforcement, and selective participation in global tax transparency initiatives, the United States may tacitly enable its firms to exploit foreign jurisdictions, thus reinforcing their global competitiveness. Though indirect, this alignment of corporate and geopolitical interests positions arbitrage as a quasi-strategic tool of US influence.

This chapter examines the relevance of sustainable development to regulation of remote work. It investigates various ways in which the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted in the UN 2030 Agenda can be relevant to remote work, offering a perspective that considers not only economic objectives but also the environmental and social pillars embedded in that instrument. It is argued that procedural aspects of sustainable development, such as the human right to freedom of association and effective collective bargaining together with the participatory governance mechanisms promoted by SDGs 16 and 17, will be important for the sustainability of remote work, in order to achieve just transitions which are both digital and green. The chapter then examines the significance of the international institutional response to sustainable remote work, both at the UN and the ILO. It considers the extent to which a corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach, which has ostensibly embraced sustainability, actually corresponds to UN and ILO standards that should govern remote work. It is suggested that this will only be possible if enhanced participatory engagement is enabled in the implementation of due diligence and just transition.

The progressive digitalization of industries and services has direct effects on the organization of labor. Telework is foremost a consequence of the general increased use of information technology in our professional and private lives. The organizational changes of labor due to digitalization however challenge the functionality and effectiveness of labor law. The employer’s comprehensible concerns, that teleworkers might pursue private interests at home, serve in practice as a justification for implementation of closed meshed monitoring measures. Hence, we face a significant paradox: even though teleworkers enjoy a putative higher degree of autonomy because they are not present at premise and therefore not subject to the employers’ physical authority, they are exposed to a higher degree of dependency rooted in digital control measures. Data protection acquires increasing importance for workers. Labor protection in many cases cannot be separated from data protection. This chapter argues that this evolution is not sufficiently mirrored by the law, and then analyses in its first part the existing shortcomings and loopholes exemplified by the problem of digital surveillance of telework. In its second part the chapter seeks to identify possible legal mechanisms to create or even foster interaction between labor and data protection law.

Transparency is increasingly promoted as a necessary step to achieve various social and environmental sustainability goals. And yet, the pervasive idea that more transparency leads to more sustainability relies on an assumption that the market can and will transform information about corporate activities into a positive sustainability outcome. Reflecting on Traidcraft Exchange’s “Who picked my tea?” campaign and some of the responses to it, this chapter uncovers some of the assumptions that motivate transparency initiatives and shows how these assumptions serve the interests of powerful actors such as corporations and their investors. In doing so, they reinforce an understanding of sustainability that rewards companies for doing little more than disclosing information they themselves have decided is appropriate to share.

Organic certification programs aim to promote transparent economic, environmental, and social trade relationships as part of their social mission. Yet, these programs often produce forms of knowledge and accountability that, while more transparent for some groups, are less transparent for others. With a focus on the vanilla supply chain in Madagascar, I ethnographically examine interactions between smallholder vanilla farmers and organic certifying agents. I note how the organic certification process privileges certain practices as transparent, and thus desirable. These include written, quantifiable, and formalized representations of vanilla fields. This focus ignores or undermines local forms of transparency, which often rely on spoken, indirect, and informal market mechanisms. The forms of transparency favored by certification projects have economic consequences, as they open spaces for additional external actors – including certification agencies themselves – to capture profit and value from the vanilla market.

During multisite fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019, across two wholesale trading hubs in the midstream pipeline of the diamond industry (Antwerp and Mumbai), diamond brokers voiced a confounding claim: they know nothing about the diamonds they broker. I argue that this reveals a core contradiction of diamond brokers: their trustworthiness depends upon their ignorance of a diamond’s value to be deemed an impartial third actor to the transaction, while their utility as a search function depends upon their knowledge of diamonds to connect buyers and sellers in the market. In the current regime of pricing transparency, standardized diamond certificates, a pricing index, and e-commerce websites now instantly reveal diamond grades and prices, upending the necessary fiction of ignorance upon which brokers rely. These technologies are not mechanistically replacing the role of human middlemen, but rather are revealing the very structural instabilities and ideological contradictions at the heart of brokerage.

This chapter examines fifty years of state-led industrial reform in the Indian tea industry with an eye to how, where, and by whom notions of transparency were deployed and contested. For nearly 100 years, from the mid 1800s to Indian independence in 1947, tea was produced in India and shipped to London for valuation, auctioning, blending, and consumption. In the early 1950s, India’s new independent bureaucracy worked to make visible the workings of the colonial tea industry. They expanded India’s tea auction infrastructure, including the storage and transportation of tea. Central to this challenge to the opacity of colonial governance was the establishment of small, governable regional auction centers across India. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these regional auction centers had come to be seen by Indian bureaucrats and regulators as sites of invisible, corrupt dealings. This chapter, then, juxtaposes post-independence reforms of the 1950s with more recent attempts to re-spatialize the tea trade: to move it out of regional auction centers and onto a nationwide trading platform, all in the name of transparency.

This chapter provides an ethnographic examination of how rubies extracted by a multinational mining company in Northern Mozambique are constructed as ethical, responsible, and transparent. At the same time, rubies extracted by small-scale miners working with screens and shovels around the company concession become unethical, illicit, and opaque. Informal ruby mining sustained a vibrant and illegal, but not necessarily illicit, international economy. Miners were subject to violent expropriation by state and company security forces. Some joined an insurgency and attacked government institutions and extractive infrastructure. That conflict continues to this day. My contention is that transparency is a technical claim, willfully mistaken as an ethical claim. Transparency is weaponized against very poor people trying to extract a living from the ground beneath their feet. As a result, ethical mining became the handmaiden to an international conflict.

Greenland is an autonomous country that is part of the Danish realm. Having achieved home rule in 1979 and self-rule in 2009, Greenlandic political elites, journalists, Danish politicians, and residents from all walks of life expect full political independence will be declared at some point in the future. Greenland’s economy is supported and buttressed by an annual “block grant” from Denmark of approximately $500 million; both Denmark and Greenland have agreed that independence will be predicated upon the end of the block grant, linked to a concomitantly expanded and dominant resource extraction economy.

While cross-cultural comparative approaches seem to be increasingly utilized across disciplines, this volume both explores and problematizes the purpose, aim, and methods underpinning the comparison of a global value such as transparency. The volume is based on research in disparate locations of the world – from European boardrooms and expert laboratories, Malagasy vanilla plantations to Indian tea auction rooms, Mozambican ruby mining to approaches to future resource extraction in Greenland. In its ensemble, the volume does more than bring empirical specificity to disparate geographies of supply chains; instead, the comparative effort seeks to assess the processes and forms of mediation enacting transparency in ideas, objects, and practices. As such, the contributions mobilize comparative effort to examine a similar object – the ideological and aspirational goal of transparency and its attendant practices, which are produced through variously different forms: technological, qualitative, institutional.