Abstract
Since the 1990s there has been increased talk of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), loosely defined as corporations’ voluntary assumption of social or environmental obligations beyond those required under the law. Organized CSR initiatives have proliferated at both the global and national levels, and a voluminous scholarly literature has accompanied them. Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Alwyn Lim bring together some of the most sophisticated recent research on this phenomenon in Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World.
The fourteen chapters are united by two broad themes, both of which stress the need to locate CSR within the “wider global, social, and political context in which corporations operate” (p.5). First, the authors emphasize how factors external to the firm influence corporate decisions about CSR, a significant departure from some prior scholarship that stresses internal firm determinants. Second, they analyze the interaction of global and domestic forces in shaping CSR initiatives and practices.
Three opening chapters examine the rise of CSR at both the national level and in the form of more recent (late 1990s+) global frameworks like the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). John Meyer, Shawn Pope, and Andrew Isaacson argue that the rise of CSR reflects the “normative and cultural” evolution of global society, contending that CSR has become institutional common sense both inside and outside the corporation (p.44). Peter Utting takes a more critical, political economy view, showing how business power has largely shaped CSR frameworks. Since the early 1990s global CSR programs have undergone a “shift toward voluntarism and partnership,” culminating in initiatives like the UNGC that were “largely devoid of enforcement mechanisms” and in which “the dominant stakeholder was clearly business” (pp.78, 79). Utting hints at the continued need for confronting corporate power, yet also stresses variation among CSR programs and therefore their possibilities.
Daniel Kinderman similarly argues that national-level CSR organizations, which predated the rise of the major global initiatives by several decades, were largely attempts by businesses “to legitimate and protect themselves against attacks by the radical corporate accountability movement” (p.138). When global frameworks like the UNGC finally emerged, the most “successful” were both “business-led” and relatively toothless (p.133); had they been otherwise, they would have attracted far fewer corporate members. However, the chapter also suggests that national ties to international non-governmental organizations encouraged the rise of national CSR organizations, thus supporting “world society” theories of CSR’s development.
The chapters in Parts II and III examine ongoing CSR “field formation” processes and corporate responses to external pressures. Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer chart the growth of supply-chain CSR in Europe and the United States. They distinguish two phases: its rise in the 1990s in response to anti-sweatshop activism, and corporations’ assumption of control over supply-chain CSR initiatives in the post-2000 years. Two chapters ask why corporations join CSR initiatives, given that membership often does not correlate clearly with increased profits. Based on regression analyses involving Fortune 500 firms, Shawn Pope emphasizes the importance of companies’ “social ties to global, national, and intercorporate networks” in determining participation in global CSR frameworks (p.253). Satoshi Miura and Kaoru Kurusu’s interviews of Japanese business representatives support this emphasis on networks; their methodological contention “that stated reasons” for CSR “are good proxies for [actual] corporate motives” seems open to debate, however (p.295).
The chapters in Part IV are particularly interesting, since they directly consider actual CSR outcomes. Ion Bogdan Vasi’s quantitative analysis of Fortune 500 companies finds that membership in global CSR frameworks correlates much more strongly with how industry analysts perceive the companies’ environmental performance than with their actual record, although membership in some initiatives (the UNGC and GRI) does positively correlate with (but does not necessarily cause) actual improvements. Tim Bartley and Doug Kincaid show that corporate “codes of conduct” have had little impact on labor conditions in Indonesian apparel factories, supporting prior research to that same effect. They highlight how existing CSR frameworks and discourse ignore the “countervailing forces” that structurally undermine such initiatives, including capital mobility and buyers’ ability to shift orders to different factories (p.396). Bartley and Kincaid are among the most critical of basic corporate prerogatives, though there is reason to doubt the feasibility of their proposed alternative of “stable, patient capitalism” (in which corporate buyers accept short-term profit reductions by allowing worker unionization and other rights improvements in their supply chains) (p.422). Brayden King and Mary-Hunter McDonnell approach CSR outcomes from a different angle, finding that firms’ attempts to cultivate a positive reputation may actually make them more vulnerable to protest when they violate their own stated norms.
As a whole, the volume convincingly argues that CSR must be understood in both its global and domestic contexts and calls attention to the many ways that corporations’ external environments shape CSR decision-making. The latter chapters also offer valuable findings about CSR outcomes. Compared to much prior research, then, the book offers a broader view of CSR and how the concept and practice have evolved over time.
In other ways, however, the volume’s focus is actually quite narrow. The role of governments in enabling or restraining corporations receives little attention, perhaps reflecting an assumption that states have become less relevant in recent decades. Although various authors mention that corporations may adopt CSR in order to preempt government regulation, they do not examine how pressures such as anticorporate protest or labor disruption might shape firms’ stances on public policy. More generally, the chapters say relatively little about how workers, social movements, and alternative institutions like worker-run enterprises and cooperatives contest (or might contest) corporate power.
I would also argue that the book neglects some of the implications of its own findings. Many of the authors note (often in passing) the manifest inadequacies of CSR initiatives: “only a tiny portion of all the major corporations in the world are members” of these voluntary initiatives (p.12), and membership requirements themselves are often quite minimal (as of this writing UNGC members include Shell, BP, Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Nike, among other shining examples of human rights and environmental responsibility). But the authors tend to avoid the logical follow-up questions. Looking beyond CSR, how might workers and social movements best target corporations? Can states be made to play a meaningful regulatory role? And can the modern corporation, and the capitalist system itself, ever be made compatible with human and planetary needs? To be sure, some CSR initiatives have brought modest improvements to people’s lives; understanding why corporations join and how the CSR field has evolved, as the book helps us do, can thus be useful. But with two or three exceptions among the chapters, certain fundamental questions about corporate capitalism remain unasked.
To some extent, this narrow focus on CSR may reflect Tsutsui and Lim’s assessment of what’s possible. They predict that voluntary “global CSR frameworks . . . will continue to be the prime locus of legitimation and contestation among actors seeking a social regulation of the global economy” (p.19). In an era of unprecedented corporate threats to life itself, that is a frightening prospect indeed.