Abstract
The primary question of this book is whether the corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR) agenda of contemporary capitalism has turned corporations from monsters into angels or merely monsters with wings posing as angels. The book proceeds by looking initially at different concepts of CSR before moving on to discuss CSR applied to media and communication corporations. Sandoval then compares the claims made about CSR to the practices of Apple, AT&T, Google, HP, Microsoft, News Corporation, Walt Disney and Vivendi in specific areas such as e-waste, labour rights, net neutrality, surveillance, software patents and file-sharing. Sandoval discovers a gulf between the rhetoric of CSR and the actual practices of these large media and communication companies. Ultimately, for Sandoval, the problem lies with the contradictions inherent in capitalism between productive forces that potentially are emancipatory and relations of production that exploit labour, create cultural enclosures and act as ideological instruments of capitalism, and these contradictions are manifest in CSR. Primarily CSR, therefore, under capitalist relations of production, is an ideology that seeks to legitimate corporations, private property and the profit motive. What is needed according to Sandoval is a responsibility to socialize corporations through building on the rhetoric of CSR and achieving change in the organization of corporations (e.g. through worker-owned co-operatives) through a strategy of radical reformism bringing together anarchist radical alternatives and social democratic remedies to neoliberal capitalism.