Abstract
There is a large and growing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility, companies’ voluntary engagement for social and environmental ends. Most of these writings have focused on the so-called “business case”—CSR’s impact on business profitability—rather than on the “social case,” CSR’s impact on the rest of us. Jeanette Brejning’s book Corporate Social Responsibility and the Welfare State addresses this important and understudied topic. Brejning’s questions are twofold: first, how do welfare states impact CSR? Second, has CSR been used to rollback the welfare state or to improve the latter’s effectiveness in tackling social exclusion?
These are big questions, and difficult ones to answer, since both CSR and the welfare state are amorphous. One way to proceed would be to operationalize CSR and the welfare state quantitatively and track their interactions over time. Brejning adopts a different, qualitative and discursive, strategy. Indeed, it should be emphasized that her book is actually about what actors say about CSR and the welfare state. The geographical focus is on Europe, the heartland of the welfare state. England and Denmark are the book’s main cases, and Germany, France, Sweden, and Norway are secondary cases. This selection ensures coverage of the liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare states. However, it should be noted that the book does not focus on welfare states per se. Instead, mixed economies of welfare direct our attention to a broader array of institutions including the market, the voluntary sector, the family, and the state. Brejning draws on thirty-four interviews she conducted with practitioners working on CSR and social exclusion in these countries. She distinguishes between different CSR discourses—Conservative, Social Democratic, Skeptical, and Radical—to interpret and analyze this material. Combined with historical institutionalism, this approach provides nuanced coverage of CSR’s role in the mixed economy of welfare.
Brejning’s central argument is that national welfare states are resilient and that national institutions shape CSR in path-dependent ways: “the historical and institutional contexts of welfare states are highly influential upon the ways in which CSR is interpreted, applied and linked to social exclusion” (p. 162). She illustrates this point in a variety of ways. For example, philanthropy has been strong in England since the Victorian era. In Scandinavian and conservative continental European welfare states, by contrast, philanthropy is viewed with skepticism. Timing is also significant: globalization shaped countries’ CSR agenda more powerfully where countries did not have a preexisting CSR agenda. The argument about CSR’s embeddedness in national institutions is compelling. Parts II and III of the book, on the history of CSR in the mixed economy of welfare and the views from CSR practitioners in England and Denmark, nicely exposes these different understandings.
The book does have some weaknesses: at times, it reads like a doctoral dissertation. Cutting back use of the passive voice would have improved readability and helped to bring out the argument even more clearly and forcefully. Concerning the book’s conclusions, I wonder whether Brejning may underestimate the extent of change in advanced welfare states and, by extension, the role of CSR in those changes. She is undoubtedly correct that we will not witness the “total replacement of the public sector by the commercial sector” (p. 158). Yet there is a growing consensus in the literature that although welfare states persist, market-oriented reforms have transformed them in subtle yet powerful ways. Even in Scandinavia, the poster-child for welfare state persistence, a great deal of liberalization has taken place. The book tends to downplay these developments. For example, given British Prime Minister David Cameron’s deep cuts to welfare spending, readers might be surprised to hear that “retrenchment is not currently taking place on a significant scale in England…” (p. 158).
The book could have benefited from more engagement with recent political economy and historical institutionalist literature. One of this literature’s central insights is that historical institutionalism needs to become more attentive to subtle and slow-moving processes of institutional change (Streeck and Thelen 2005). Despite welfare state persistence and cross-national divergence, beneath the façade of institutional continuity and high expenditure levels, policies of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation have transformed economies and societies (Streeck and Thelen 2005; Streeck 2009). Focusing on the persistence of the welfare state and the continued embeddedness of CSR in welfare regimes may underestimate the extent of change in these political economies, and the role of CSR in those changes. While Brejning claims that “[w]here there are signs of retrenchment…this development cannot be said to be happening as a result of CSR” (p. 158), Apostolakou and Jackson (2010) find that CSR substitutes for institutionalized forms of stakeholder participation. Kinderman (2012) finds that CSR has co-evolved with policies of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization in the United Kingdom.
Most of my quibbles relate to the book’s treatment of the English case. While Brejning’s attempt to distinguish between different ideal types of CSR discourses is laudable, I wonder whether they actually play out in practice. Brejning claims that the liberal CSR discourse is opposed to government involvement in CSR. This is certainly true as far as market-correcting interventionist regulation is concerned, and she shows that this is also true of her English CSR interviewees’ self-understandings. But is this the way things really work, and has this always been the case? British governments subsidize CSR. Business in the Community, a business-led CSR organization referred to repeatedly in the book, has received public sector grants since the early 1980s. In light of the neoliberal revolution that England has undergone during the past decades, and the shifts this engendered within the mixed economy of welfare, it is unclear why Brejning regards the anti-statist attitude as “the outcome of an already existing and institutionally dependent preferences (sic) regarding the division of funding responsibilities in the mixed economy of welfare” (p. 134). The book also states that the incentivization of business “to show solidarity with other parts of society” (p. 48) is inimical to and distinct from conservative politics. The fact that Thatcherites consciously pursued this strategy to fill the gaps created by liberalization (Kinderman 2012) casts doubt on this claim.
These quibbles do not suggest that Brejning’s book is not worth reading—it certainly is. It is above all interesting and empirically rich; and scholars are far from a consensus on these matters. The literature on CSR, like CSR itself, is in flux. Corporate Social Responsibility and the Welfare State is a very welcome, thoroughly researched contribution to this literature.