Abstract
Governments are widely viewed by academics and practitioners (and society more generally) as the key societal actors who are capable of compelling businesses to practice corporate social responsibility (CSR). Arguably, such government involvement could be seen as a technocratic device for encouraging ethical business behaviour. In this paper, we offer a more politicised interpretation of government engagement with CSR where “CSR” is not a desired form of business conduct but an element of discourse that governments can deploy in structuring their relationships with other social actors. We build our argument through a historical analysis of government CSR discourse in the Russian Federation. Laclau and Mouffe's (Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics,Verso Books, London, 1985) social theory of hegemony underpins our research. We find that “CSR” in the Russian government’s discourse served to legitimise its power over large businesses. Using this case, we contribute to wider academic debates by providing fresh empirical evidence that allows the development of critical evaluation tools in relation to governments’ engagement with “CSR”. We find that governments are capable of hijacking CSR for their own self-interested gain. We close the paper by reflecting on the merit of exploring the case of the Russian Federation. As a “non-core”, non-western exemplar, it provides a useful “mirror” with which to reflect on the more widely used test-bed of Western industrial democracies when scrutinising CSR. Based on our findings, we invite other scholars to adopt a more critical, politicised stance when researching the role of governments in relation to CSR in other parts of the world.
Highlights
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), or the idea that business organisations should go beyond a certain financial performance and legal compliance to contribute to social welfare and environmental protection through their operations (Crane et al 2013; Dahlsrud 2008) has increasingly become an area of government involvement
Returning to our aim to politicise and critically question government engagement with CSR, we suggest that our analysis of the Russian federal government CSR discourse provides an example where the function of the “CSR” term in the government officials’ discourse is not limited to the facilitating of more ethical business conduct
The aim of our research was to question the predominant understanding of government as a benign actor in the literature on government engagement with CSR
Summary
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), or the idea that business organisations should go beyond a certain financial performance and legal compliance to contribute to social welfare and environmental protection through their operations (Crane et al 2013; Dahlsrud 2008) has increasingly become an area of government involvement. Governments’ motivation for engagement in and with CSR has not received extensive critical attention. Much of the past and recent critical academic research into CSR has focused on the roles of business as political actors (e.g. Ehrnström and Fuentes 2016; Fooks et al 2013; Néron 2013; Scherer and Palazzo 2011; Scherer et al 2014; Scherer 2018; Whelan 2012), leaving the issue of the role of government actors relatively underdeveloped or neglected as a research field. Most existing studies that examine government engagement with CSR tend to focus on the form that the government intervention takes or should take Albareda et al 2007, 2008; Vallentin and Murillo 2012; Keskitalo et al 2012). Vallentin (2015a) and Vallentin and Murillo
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