ABSTRACT
The increased international popularity of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and decreasing satisfaction of the general public with conventional politics has led to NGOs moving from being ‘ladles in the soup kitchen to a force for transformation in global politics’ (Doh and Teegen, 2002 ; Edwards and Fowler, 2002 , p. 1). The rise of NGOs as important actors in international business in particular can be traced back to the 1980s when international companies were pressured to divest from South Africa, resulting in the withdrawal of a large amount of US and British companies. In this period, NGOs gained credence as legitimate actors in international business due to their involvement in negotiations over the development of conditions surrounding trade and investment rules (Doh and Teegen, 2002 ). Since then, NGO numbers have grown exponentially and their infl uence in arenas such as international business, development aid and corporate governance has escalated (Doh and Teegen, 2002 ; Lehman, 2007 ). Commenting in the early 1990s, one analyst suggested that this ‘quiet revolution’ in the role and infl uence of NGOs could ‘prove to be as significant to the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation state was to the latter nineteenth century’ (Salamon, 1994 , p. 109, cited in Fisher, 1997 , p. 440). Najam ( 1996 , p. 339) claims that at this time ‘most NGO scholars also happen[ed] to be NGO believers’ who had implicit faith in NGOs’ work, be it as advocates of specifi c causes such as human rights and social justice, providers of relief and humanitarian assistance, or as facilitators of development. This enabled the emergence of a myth of NGO infallibility and a concomitant reluctance to closely scrutinize the presumed ‘magic’ of NGOs’ work (Lloyd, 2005 ; Najam, 1996 ).
