The impact of the recent worldwide financial and economic crisis has made abundantly clear that the market-creating, regulation-avoiding core of globalization has had far-reaching consequences for the world of labour. Within a neoliberal framework, the spreading of cross-border labour processes through the globalization of production has fostered both the ‘economic integration of countries and the disintegration of production processes’(Wood 2001: 41). Spatially dispersed and networklike economic structures have facilitated shareholder value maximization by allowing MNEs to distribute financial risks and, at the same time, control the streams of value added by local production (Sydow 1992; Fichter and Sydow 2002; Gereffi et al. 2005). The spread of this global re-organization of work has, however, not proceeded unchallenged. There are countless examples of protests, campaigns, demonstrations, strikes and boycotts led by NGOs and trade un ions around issues of labour and environmental standards, which have raised awareness and had some measure of success in exposing irresponsible business practices. The publicity generated by such critiques has brought the contested nature of the global reorganization of work (Amoore 2002) to light. Most generally, MNEs have responded by adopting a unilateral and voluntaristic approach as exemplified by the emergence of CSR and a myriad of individual codes of conduct (Mamic 2004; ILO 2002). But as John Ruggie (1982) has argued, the level of institutional embeddedness1 of business and labour in a societal context once achiev ed in many industrialized countries is not being replicated at the global level. Indeed, globally coordinated, comprehensive and legally binding controls are still far from becoming reality.