By Frank de Bakker, Dirk Matten, Laura Spence & Christopher Wickert
The role of business in society has attracted considerable research interest over the past decades. Next to themes such as sustainability, social entrepreneurship, multi-stakeholder initiatives and business ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a prominent domain in its own right within management and organizational research. Starting from that observation, we set out to kick start the reconsideration of the socio-economic context of CSR’s starting place, broadly speaking capitalism, and to develop a more nuanced understanding of CSR in the contemporary neoliberal political economy. In doing so, we draw attention to the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ – how our current capitalist economic system forces us into a (too) narrow conception of CSR, and how important questions are left unattended.
CSR, as a modern management practice, emerged in the United States as a strategic response to the New Deal. The wide-reaching impact of the New Deal on the laisser faire approach to capitalism had previously led to the Great Depression of the late 1920s; CSR therefore should ‘save’ American capitalism (Kaplan, 2012). Nearly a century later, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, CSR has been reframed as an integral part of addressing certain shortfalls in the societal impacts of the current model of global capitalism – the well-known ‘Creating Shared Value’ notion is a clear (but not uncontested) example.
Yet, the current state of the world, with pressing issues such as climate change and many forms of inequality and populism, raises the question of whether the dominant neoliberal capitalist system poses important constraints on corporate actions that make negative social, environmental and ethical externalities of business conduct unavoidable, or might even systematically encourage them. This leads to heated debates, both on the applicability of CSR and of larger systemic issues and socio-political ‘deep structures’, which appear to impose important constraints on business sustainability. For a themed section of Business & Society, we therefore invited submissions that explored business and society themes from the perspective of the contemporary political economy and the predominant neoliberal economic paradigm. Although we received a range of submissions, in the end only two manuscripts made it through the review process. The theme is challenging and requires rethinking our current world in several ways. Yet, the papers that eventually got published do an excellent job in doing just that.
In the first paper, Anselm Schneider argues that the need for companies to legitimize their activities in a capitalist system to a large extent shapes their CSR effort. He explores the systemic pathologies of CSR and then discusses the implications for CSR research, wondering whether CSR is bound to fail in the current capitalist context. In the second paper, Anne Vestergaard, Luisa Murphy, Mette Morsing and Thilde Langevang examine cross-sector partnerships as development agents in a capitalist system, presenting a new framework which conceptualizes ‘impact as empowerment’ and highlighting currently unrecognized dynamics, which contribute to shaping the ability of a partnership to serve as a development agent.
Although this themed section only contains two articles, we are convinced that both articles offer an important contribution to the debate on corporations, social responsibility and capitalism. To move the debate on the relationship between business and society forward, it is important to understand the nature of the systemic constraints and their influence on organizational practices. We need to stretch the levels of analysis of current CSR research and, in particular, investigate how the level of the broader political economy influences behavior at lower levels of analysis. This themed section aims to call attention to this need – after all, the number of studies considering these systemic tensions in management and organization studies still remains limited, but is growing (e.g., Böhm, Misoczky, & Moog, 2012; Crane & Matten, 2020; Ehrnström‐Fuentes, 2016; Whiteman et al., 2013; Wright & Nyberg, 2015). Notwithstanding these advances, in other domains of social sciences, such as sociology (Sapinski, 2015) or political economy (Sandoval, 2015), similar ideas are being developed and gaining traction. The systemic issues at hand are sufficiently problematic that broader perspectives are warranted and hence more interdisciplinary research would be welcome here.
References
Böhm, S., Misoczky, M. C., & Moog, S. 2012. Greening capitalism? A Marxist critique of carbon markets. Organization Studies, 33(11): 1617-1638.
Crane, A., & Matten, D. 2020. COVID19 and the future of CSR research. Journal of Management Studies. Forthcoming.
de Bakker, F.G.A., Matten, D., Spence, L.J., & Wickert, C. 2010. The Elephant in the Room: The Nascent Research Agenda on Corporations, Social Responsibility, and Capitalism. Business & Society, 59(7):1295-1302. doi:10.1177/0007650319898196
Ehrnström‐Fuentes, M. 2016. Delinking legitimacies: A pluriversal perspective on political CSR. Journal of Management Studies, 53(3): 433-462.
Kaplan, R. 2014. Who has been regulating whom, business or society? The mid-20th century institutionalization of ‘corporate responsibility’ in the USA. Socio-Economic Review, 13: 125-155.
Sandoval, M. 2015. From CSR to RSC: a contribution to the critique of the political economy of corporate social responsibility. Review of Radical Political Economics, 47(4): 608-624.
Sapinski, J. P. 2015. Climate capitalism and the global corporate elite network. Environmental Sociology, 1(4): 268-279.
Whiteman, G., Walker, B., & Perego, P. 2013. Planetary boundaries: Ecological foundations for corporate sustainability. Journal of Management Studies, 50(2): 307–336.
Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. 2015. Climate change, capitalism, and corporations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.