Political Corporate Social Responsibility Research Articles

Morality Meet Politics, Politics Meet Morality: Exploring the Political in Political Responsibility

This brief response to Smith focuses on his distinction between moral and political responsibility in general and how it relates to human rights in particular. It argues that the notion of political responsibility as is used in the debate on political CSR often does not exclude morality but is based on it.

Global Justice and International Business

ABSTRACT:Little theoretical attention has been paid to the question of what obligations corporations and other business enterprises have to the four billion people living at the base of the global economic pyramid. This article makes several theoretical contributions to this topic. First, it is argued that corporations are properly understood as agents of global justice. Second, the legitimacy of global governance institutions and the legitimacy of corporations and other business enterprises are distinguished. Third, it is argued that a deliberative democracy model of corporate legitimacy defended by theorists of political CSR is unsatisfactory. Fourth, it is argued that a Rawlsian theoretical framework fails to provide a satisfactory account of the obligations of corporations regarding global justice. Finally, an ethical conception of CSR grounded in an appropriately modest set of duties tied to corporate relationships is then defended. This position is cosmopolitan in scope and grounded in overlapping arguments for human rights.

Pluralism in Political Corporate Social Responsibility

ABSTRACT:Within corporate social responsibility (CSR), the exploration of the political role of firms (political CSR) has recently experienced a revival. We review three key periods of political CSR literature—classic, instrumental, and new political CSR—and use the Rawlsian conceptualization of division of moral labor within political systems to describe each period’s background political theories. The three main arguments of the paper are as follows. First, classic CSR literature was more pluralistic in terms of background political theories than many later texts. Second, instrumental CSR adopted classical liberalism and libertarian laissez-faire as its structural logic. Third, new political CSR, based on a strong globalist transition of responsibilities and tasks from governments to companies, lacks a conceptualization of division of moral labor that is needed to fully depart from a classical liberalist position. We end by providing a set of recommendations to develop pluralism in political CSR.

The Political Perspective of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Critical Research Agenda

ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required.

Filling Governance Gaps through Political CSR

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges resulting from private firms providing public goods and services in developing countries. Defined as Political CSR, this form of social initiati...

Erratum to: The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility: Techniques of Neutralization, Stakeholder Management and Political CSR

Erratum to: The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility: Techniques of Neutralization, Stakeholder Management and Political CSR

The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility: Techniques of Neutralization, Stakeholder Management and Political CSR.

Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively underdeveloped. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning business activity with the broader public interest. This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR.

Corporate Social Responsibility in Transitional Countries: Public Relations as a Component of Public Diplomacy in Romania

This study explores corporate citizenship as a component of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and considers how corporations may work as nonstate actors in diplomatic efforts, using a theoretical framework of political CSR that includes corporate citizenship. It also looks at how congruent CSR strategies are with cultural values of the host country. It used a qualitative analysis of 90 news releases found on Romanian Web sites of U.S. corporations, written in Romanian, and analyzed by Romanian researchers who provided a cultural lens through which to assess cultural congruency. Findings show CSR activities of U.S. companies are not always congruent with Romanian cultural norms, but may contribute to a culture-building process in transitional, post-Communist countries.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility: Between Deliberation and Radicalism

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.

Conceptualizing the Political Role of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises as Private Actors in Global Governance

In this paper, I theoretically discuss the emerging role of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as private actors in global governance – referring to the collective rule-making and rule-implementation among public and private actors on a global scale. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of ‘political’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social connection as well as on empirical evidence, I suggest that SMEs are, on the one hand, as much as multinational corporations (MNEs) exposed to governance gaps of social and environmental regulation when operating in the global marketplace; on the other hand they do not follow the same approach to (political) CSR as MNEs, due to different organizational characteristics, limited financial and human resources and motivational factors. Notwithstanding, numerous examples exist where SMEs are already accepting an active role in global governance, e.g., by following the 10 principles of the UN Global Compact and engaging in (multi)stakeholder dialogue. I theoretically develop a conceptual framework for the systematic assessment of how SMEs approach global governance and embed political responsibility in their organizational settings.

MNEs and the UN Global Compact: An Empirical Analysis of the Organizational Implementation of Corporate Citizenship

The UN Global Compact (UNGC) is the largest “corporate citizenship” (CC) initiative in the world. Almost 5000 companies have signed the initiative whereby they voluntarily commit themselves to adhere to ten principles in the areas of human rights, labor rights, the environ-ment and anti-corruption (www.unglobalcompact.org). More than nine years after the launch of the UNGC the question arises on how far the participants have progressed in the implemen-tation of the Compact’s principles. This paper presents the results of an empirical assessment of the implementation process at five large Swiss corporations that have been participants of the UNGC since the initiation of the Global Compact. The results illustrate that CC is a learn-ing process and corporations are at different stages of development. To date, only few compa-nies are implementing CC as intended by the founders of the UNGC. Also, some aspects show that companies assume a political role in their global business activities. In our study we make two contributions: (1) we develop an analytical tool for the assessment of how deeply corporate citizenship is embedded in the organizational structures and procedures of the UNGC companies. (2) With the help of this tool we deliver empirical insights into the imple-mentation of CC at five large Swiss multinational corporations that are members of the UNGC. In addition, the study confirms the theoretical argument of recent literature in political CSR that multinational corporations are contributing to emerging global governance struc-tures.