False legitimation through political corporate social responsibility

Abstract

Recent academic discussion of corporate social responsibility has identified a political shift in corporate societal roles. Politicization of corporations has been connected with globalization and its effect on the inability of national governance structures to govern global economic activity. Both positive and negative societal outcomes of this politicisation have been identified. The roles of governance and business in society have been blurred. In this paper I look at two research streams that have discussed the political role and participation of business corporations in public policy from different perspectives; firstly, the political corporate social responsibility discussion has approached soft law development in particular as an outcome of the inability of regulatory frameworks to respond to the challenges of economic globalisation, and secondly, discussion of nonmarket strategy and corporate political activity has focused on the political activity of corporations by concentrating on business outcomes. In this paper, I start developing a concept of false legitimisation to facilitate understanding and analysis of the differences and similarities between political CSR and nonmarket strategy activity. The focus is on the procedural aspects of the issue. I then proceed to analyse how theoretical conceptualisations are blurred in the concrete expected outcomes of corporate political activity.