By Aurélien Feix and Déborah Philippe
Narratives about the emergence, spread and impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices, generated by organizations such as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) are fraught with ambiguity as they avoid addressing problematic matters. Specifically, these are the win-lose situations between the profit interests of companies and the demands of society for greater economic justice and environmental protection, the continued detrimental contribution by companies to the aggravation of income inequality and ecological degradation, and the past and present ineffectiveness of CSR practices in solving those problems. In our article, we argue for contesting the comforting, but inconsequential, meaning that these narratives attach to the notion of “Corporate Social Responsibility”.
Organizations dedicated to promoting CSR within the business world—such as the UNGC, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the Global Reporting Initiative—often justify the need for more “responsible” corporate behavior through storytelling, i.e. by producing persuasive narratives. Typically, these narratives stress the gravity of socio-environmental problems, praise companies’ past and present efforts in attempting to address these issues, and outline the vision of a radically transformed, i.e. socially just and ecologically viable economy that could possibly result from the generalized adoption of good CSR practices. A video clip entitled “Business as a Force for Good”, which marked the 15th anniversary of the UNGC, provides a concise but representative example of such narratives (https://www.unglobalcompact.org/library/3021).
However, what do these narratives tell us about the way in which the corporate world conceives of its “responsibility” vis-à-vis society? And are they truly conducive to the profound transformation of our economic system which they envision?
To pursue these questions, we conducted an in-depth analysis of nearly 50 such stories. Our main insight is that the narratives under study are fraught with recurrent ambivalences—six in total —which we show to be reflective of three deep-set taboos . These taboos revolve around crucially important matters, which the examined stories nevertheless circumvent to the greatest extent possible.
The first of these taboos concerns the existence of win-lose situations, i.e. of instances where it does not pay for companies to act in a manner that fosters sustainability. The second taboo is that of companies’ continued contribution to the emergence and aggravation of global socio-environmental problems. The third one relates to the past and present ineffectiveness of companies’ CSR activities in solving those issues.
The result is that these studied narratives conjure up a problematic understanding of CSR: It raises hope for the corporate world’s ability to solve global grievances, while at the same time leaving unquestioned the underlying socioeconomic mechanisms that have generated these problems in the first place. In our article, we also show how stereotypical CSR language—such as pictures of hands holding a sprouting plant and the talk about grand “challenges”, “visions”, and “journeys”—reproduces the ambivalences uncovered by our analysis, and thereby perpetuates the shallow meaning attached to the notion of CSR.
However, this does not mean that this type of rhetoric cannot be resisted: We conclude our article by calling for challenging the understanding of CSR that is conveyed by the analyzed narratives, notably by actively breaking their taboos and by deliberately refraining from using the aforementioned stereotypical CSR language.
References:
Feix, A., & Philippe, D. 2020. Unpacking the Narrative Decontestation of CSR: Aspiration for Change or Defense of the Status Quo? Business & Society, 59 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0007650318816434