The Oxford-Achilles Working Group
on Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract: This well-attended talk drew on Dr Berlan's extensive research with children in Ghana and the UK, and emphasised the need for taking children's views seriously in CSR research.

Biography: Dr Berlan is a Research Fellow in Marketing, Culture and Society and joined the Marketing team in September 2006. She is working on key issues relating to marketing and consumption and developing some of her existing work on Fair Trade, child rights and Corporate Social Responsibility, as well as developing new research on child obesity in the UK.

A Social Anthropologist by training, she completed her Doctorate at the University of Oxford on child labour in the production of cocoa in September 2005. The research was based on 15 months of fieldwork carried out in Ghana and in part extended earlier research on the impact of Fair Trade on cocoa farmers in the same region. Dr Berlan has a long-standing interest in using ethnographic research and a socio-cultural approach to promote a better understanding of supply chain dynamics, Corporate Social Responsibility and ethical brands.

She has also worked as an independent consultant on issues such as Fair Trade, child labour, education, birth registration and child trafficking. In 2002, she worked as an intern on the International Labour Organisation International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour in Accra, where she also administrated a charity for street children.

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