Abstract
Scholarship on corporate social responsibility has proliferated in the last couple of decades. Sustained research in this area had engendered greater analytical precision in terms of understanding CSR’s scope, antecedents and outcomes. While there remains no consensus as to what the term precisely means, the extant literature, by and large, concludes that it holds significant benefits both for the businesses that adopt CSR initiatives and for the broader communities in which these businesses are located. This win-win or doing well by being good perspective underscores how CSR can be the quintessential source by which to abridge the disjuncture in the interests of business versus society. Perhaps for this reason, CSR has become a mainstay in the discourses occurring within corporations, business schools and the popular press.
In their text, The End of Corporate Social Responsibility: Crisis and Critique, Peter Fleming and Marc Jones provide a thorough intervention to this perspective by forwarding an incisive appraisal of the research and the practice of CSR. Indeed, moving against the current of mainstream interpretations, which have systematically outlined the benefits of CSR and which have been circulated by scholars in the field of organization and management studies with great enthusiasm, Fleming and Jones question the very utility of the idea. For them, the discourse of CSR poses a series of pejorative outcomes that ought to be brought to social consciousness and appropriately deconstructed. Working from this ‘critical’ framework, they argue, through various contextualized examples, that CSR, contrary to its conventional depictions, is purposefully and strategically invoked by corporate leaders to acquire legitimacy or to otherwise increase the likelihood of their firm’s success – and, for them, this notion of success caters, almost exclusively, to the interests of the economic bottom line.
Fleming and Jones open their book with the provocative and cynical assertion that ‘corporate social responsibility never really began’ (p. 1), a theme that is explicitly articulated and rearticulated throughout the text. They predicate their assertion on the claim that ‘the majority of its proponents claim to free us somehow from the excesses of a system that is itself excessive (i.e. neo-liberal capitalism)’ (p. 96). As such, Fleming and Jones take their theoretical departure from the argument – which has already been propagated in the extant literature that critically approaches questions of political economy (e.g. Banerjee, 2008) – that CSR initiatives are a functional component of the current system of neo-liberal capitalism. It is at the problematic interface between the discourse of CSR and the discursive edifices that sustain neo-liberal capitalism that the most illuminating insights of this text are to be found.
Fleming and Jones encourage readers to account for the ‘nature’ of business under the current institutional conditions to discern an acute understanding into the paradoxical tension between business practice and CSR (see Devinney, 2009). These institutional conditions, in which contemporary businesses perform, unequivocally afford paramountcy to self-serving economic interests over benevolent behaviours that give due consideration to (what has now become part of commonplace CSR vernacular) external stakeholders. Hence, for them, corporate leaders who prioritize such interests are not necessarily misguided or evil – tacitly rejecting the ‘bad apples’ thesis – but rather they are being consistent with the fundamental mandate of the system in which they work. In other words, the institutional arrangement that constitutes neo-liberal capitalism is incapable of relegating the logic of economic rationality in the name of the social good. CSR, then, becomes configured in such (de-radicalized) ways that it ultimately becomes part of the arsenal of its master; that is to say, it lends itself to the logic of neo-liberal capitalism.
Elaborating on this point, Fleming and Jones ominously warn that a significant implication emerges from CSR being discursively constituted as a ‘functional element of hegemony’ (p. 98). To borrow Zizek’s neo-Marxist notion of the ‘false consciousness of ideology’, the discourse of CSR serves as an integral mechanism whereby the socially and the environmentally irresponsible behaviour of corporations are rendered largely invisible to critique (Prasad & Holzinger, 2013). As Fleming and Jones remark, ‘CSR is particularly problematic because it conceals the very source of the ills it claims to address’ (p. 3). Zizek’s concept appears to capture the spirit of Fleming and Jones’ pivotal concern. Namely, for Fleming and Jones, CSR performs as insulation for the current reified system of neo-liberal capitalism insofar as it negates the emergence of radical critique that would substantively question and repudiate its underlying ethos. By extension, ideological deployments of CSR prevent the envisioning of alternative systems that would fundamentally structure society along principles that are different – indeed, even antithetical – to the codified values of neo-liberal capitalism.
This is indeed the perversity of CSR, which Fleming and Jones are seeking to illuminate. That while it may purport otherwise, it actually operates as a tool for maintaining the status quo and its undergirding hierarchical systems of domination and subordination. If we are to take anything from this book, it ought to be this very point: to understand the embedded role of CSR to the functioning of the ongoing political and economic system. Neo-liberal capitalism endemically privileges certain classes at the relational disenfranchisement of Others. These Others – who, for brevity, we might consider as the bottom 99 percent, as the recent Occupy Wall Street movement has dubbed them – must acquiesce to their own marginalization for the system to perform without significant disruption or subversion. This prompts the question: Why would the oppressed not revolt against a system that is ontologically fraught with issues of injustice and that allocates disproportionate privilege to the few? In answering this question, Fleming and Jones assert that CSR, and related ‘good-will’ initiatives, serve concurrently to temper the possibilities of social and political revolution and to convince oppressed classes that the overarching system in place is virtuous and can be perfected through minor alterations. Again, this allows for the negation of conceiving and institutionalizing a radically alternative system that would, in the most liberating of cases, move towards the emancipation of what some postcolonial theorists have labelled the subaltern. This line of thought shares affinity with the argument that CSR and even such things as anti-corporate resistance campaigns become subsumed by, and even serviceable to, the very capitalist system that they endeavour to transgress (see Kozinets & Handelman, 2004). On this point, Fleming and Jones observe: ‘CSR is not really meant to be taken seriously or identified with too ardently. The same might be said for corporate democracy, self-managing teams, a culture of caring and all manner of other liberal motifs in society today’ (p. 103, emphasis in original).
The book is presented in five substantive chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 attempts to bring into focus those things that conventional pursuits of CSR neglect to take into account. Specifically, Fleming and Jones illustrate how mainstream approaches to CSR neither sufficiently nor holistically recognize the ‘systemic damage’ that is inflicted on individual workers, communities and the environment as a consequence of various corporate activities. Chapter 2 revisits the idea of corporate citizenship vis-a-vis the multinational corporation. They maintain that multinational corporations will furnish individuals with citizenship rights only to the extent that it advances the business case and, thereby, in the end, it only works to consolidate the interests of the corporation. Chapter 3 develops the concept of critical stakeholder analysis (which they develop from their earlier work[Jones & Fleming, 2003]), a notion that merits greater scholarly inquisition. As Fleming and Jones note, critical stakeholder analysis vividly discloses how the often lauded idea of stakeholder dialogue does not sufficiently consider power relations between different constituents impacted by corporate activities. Chapter 4 uses CSR to articulate the crucial nexus between the individual employee and the corporation. Namely, the authors contend that CSR is the bridge by which the differences in the ideologies of a conscientious employee and the profit-seeking corporation (read: the employer) is attenuated so as to maintain halcyon intra-organizational relations. Chapter 5 endeavours to extend what Banerjee calls the ‘political economy of CSR’. They explain that CSR develops in conjunction with neocapitalism and that it is ‘a way that organizations prospect for new ideas, legitimacy and ultimately profit’ (p. 81). While the different arguments described here have sporadically appeared in the field from various critically inflected scholars, I applaud the authors in synthesizing and bringing together this astute set of ideas into a single, coherent text.
In closing, this text will be of interest to several audiences. Indeed, given the broad philosophical and practitioner discourses in which Fleming and Jones engage, the thought-provoking ideas found in the book will appeal to anyone who wishes to comprehensively account for the implications of contemporary CSR initiatives. In terms of readership from the scholarly community, this text will be an indispensible resource, especially for those students interested in studying CSR from critical vantage points. In sum, in complementing the extant scholarship that has developed in the last decade – largely from scholars working within the domain of critical management studies – and which seeks to highlight the concept’s ‘dark side’, this text begins to set the foundation from which to interpret, problematize and deconstruct the very ontology of corporate social responsibility. Definitely a worthwhile read.