Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), corporate sustainability and related concepts have arrived in the mainstream of business practice, business school teaching, and business research. Companies implement extensive CSR programmes and issue still more extensive reports about their CSR activities; business schools include the topics of CSR and responsible management in their core curricula; and CSR research is regularly published in the most prestigious journals in management and organisation theory. Many practitioners and researchers hope that CSR will eventually enable fairer and more sustainable forms of economic activity.
However, despite the almost unanimous acceptance of CSR in the business world, almost all available indicators show that the problems, which CSR aims to solve, are deteriorating. CO2 emissions are rising every year (UNEP, 2019), and the time window to avoid irreversible climate change is closing rapidly (Steffen et al., 2018). Economic inequality is already at levels not witnessed since the early 1900s, and rising steadily (Piketty, 2014). Exploitation of workers – from low wages and dangerous working conditions to slave labour – is a common facet of our global economic system (ILO, 2017).
If all these problems persist and actually worsen despite the communicated efforts of the business world to address them within the scope of their CSR activities, we need to ask whether CSR has any value. In order to explore whether CSR is indeed bound to fail, I explore the most common criticisms of CSR: that CSR works as an expansion of corporate power, propagates a “business ontology” according to which market mechanisms are strictly preferably over alternative modes of societal coordination, and is most often used as a means to veil essentially problematic business activities. I also review attempts to explain the failure of companies to become more responsible.
The large majority of research explains the barriers to successful CSR by looking at the individual or organisational level. Based on this observation, I develop a model that connects the individual and business firm levels with their systemic context – contemporary neoliberal capitalism – in which business operates, and through which CSR is, therefore, necessarily shaped. I show that all of the failures of CSR identified are necessary implications of the dynamics of capitalism: material and symbolic expansion as well as a continuous need to re-legitimise capitalism in light of its ongoing crises and failures.
While one implication of this systemic explanation of the shortcomings of CSR might be that CSR is indeed bound to fail, I provide a more nuanced assessment in my article. There is indeed a strong tendency of unsustainable and problematic market forces to shape CSR and, thus, make it ineffective or use it even as a vehicle of the unsustainable dynamics of capitalism. This implies that CSR is unsuited as a substitute for the contributions of democratically accountable governments to social welfare. However, CSR might work as complement to governmental policies, and therefore has the potential to eventually contribute to a fairer and more sustainable society. A precondition is that business activities, and therefore also CSR, take place within functioning regulatory frameworks, which at least partly remedy the unsustainable dynamics of capitalism.
Reference:
Schneider, A. 2020. Bound to Fail? Exploring the Systemic Pathologies of CSR and Their Implications for CSR Research. Business & Society, 59(7):1303-1338.