Political Corporate Social Responsibility: Between Deliberation and Radicalism

Abstract

It is a relatively common assertion today that globalization is leading to a change in the role of the corporation. Whilst globalization exposes the limited ability of nation-states to develop effective systems of global regulation, concurrently we witness privatization of areas that formerly were the responsibility of the state. The combination of a global governance deficit, increasingly influenced by corporate responses such as self-regulation and/or involvement in global institutions, combined with a greater involvement of corporations in delivering roles formerly assigned to state governments, has led to proposals that we need a new paradigm for CSR. It is suggested, by Scherer and Palazzo, that this paradigm needs to recognize the more politically-active role of business in today’s evolving post-Westphalian global order. This `political CSR’ needs to acknowledge that the old presumptions of liberal democratic theory, in which there is a strict separation of the political and economic spheres, no longer applies. Instead, Scherer and Palazzo argue that, for pragmatic reasons, the theory of `political CSR’ should be informed by Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy.In this paper, we first outline the arguments made both for `political CSR’ and for its linking to deliberative democracy. We argue that by presenting deliberative democracy as a pragmatic and procedural approach to questions of the political, Scherer and Palazzo overlook and sidestep the importance of also understanding the philosophical underpinnings of Habermas’s theory. Exploring those philosophical issues more directly, we expose the limitations and the hidden depoliticizing normativity of `political CSR’ - illustrating this empirically with a critique of the Forest Stewardship Council, Scherer and Palazzo’s exemplar for `political CSR’ and deliberative democracy. As a corrective, we confront directly the philosophical issues raised by Habermas’s development of Critical Theory. By situating his work in the context of philosophical debates in Critical Theory, both before and since Habermas, we show how Critical Theory has persistently failed to identify universal philosophical foundations from which to derive normative positions. In contrast to this problematic search for grounding universals, we argue that `political CSR’ needs to be developed through political theory that recognizes that the core of the political is always difference, contestation and undecidability. We propose therefore that `political CSR’ ought to be developed with much more reference to post-foundational political philosophy, and suggest that a more appropriate political theory to turn to would be Laclau and Mouffe’s social theory of hegemony and the radical democratic perspective that this leads to.