Abstract
This is an extended, and updated, sequel of Sundar’s (2000) earlier book Beyond Business: From Merchant Charity to Corporate Citizenship, which is now out of print. In the book, Sundar attempts to discuss, historically, the relation between business and society in India, mediated variously through charity in the past, philanthropy and more recently, corporate social responsibility. Starting from the middle of the 19th century, this book maps the shifts in the imaginaries and practices of businesses’ social responsibility, up to the present day.
In the first introductory chapter, Sundar begins by outlining the increasing interest in corporate social responsibility, globally, through the increase in wealth; communism’s demise, which has placed markets and private businesses ever more centrally; and the challenges to it post-financial global crisis – all of which have brought the question of businesses’ relationship with society to bear. She then attempts to ground the question within the Indian context in two ways, first through the status of, or lack of, development in the country, and the potential role businesses can play; and second, by invoking the uniquely Indian ‘tradition’ of corporate social responsibility. These ideas of what constitutes philanthropy or businesses’ social responsibility have been developed further in the second chapter. In the following Part 1 of the book, much of which is from her earlier book, Sundar traces the past of philanthropy in India in four chapters. The first of which lays the ground in terms of changes in the Indian economy, its social and sectoral composition, followed by three additional chapters that discuss philanthropy in India from the middle of the 19th-century colonial India up to post-liberalisation India. The second part of the book is dedicated to the present, that is, discussion on business’ social responsibility in post-liberalisation India from 1991 onwards, which has seen the opening up of the Indian economy, bringing foreign capital and multi-national corporations into the country, but also the dismantling of the regulated economy of the past, providing ever more significant latitude to private businesses, including a shift within the economy towards the service sector. This part contains two chapters, the first outlining the changes within the wider context, including the millennium development goals as the overarching development framework, increasing civil society activism prompting businesses into action, increasing proposals on legislated corporate social responsibility in the country, changes within corporate social responsibility through Global Compact and increasing codes and standards for businesses to comply with. The second chapter in this part describes corporate social responsibility in post-liberalisation India, including related policies, management, modes of engagement and the nature of social action supported through corporate social responsibility. The third and the last part, covering two chapters, presents the emerging challenges for corporate social responsibility, and finally, Sundar’s suggestion for businesses to rethink corporate social responsibility beyond enlightened self-interest, through the Gandhian conception of trusteeship.
In her work, and throughout it, Sundar has worked with premise of acceptance, and the inevitability now in a post-Communist world, of the positive, and in other cases potential, contribution of businesses towards society. In this, she makes use of the now mainstream conceptual vocabulary of enlightened self-interest, social responsibility as good for businesses through triple bottom-line profits, and bottom of the pyramid, to make her case. As a result of this belief or starting point, the failures – such as those of Tata’s initiative with prawn farming in Chilka, in Singur over the setting up of the car production factory on forcibly acquired land, and in Kalinganagar – have been described either as exceptions or as poor corporate social responsibility. They are, therefore, left either unattended or under-attended in Sundar’s work, and have been used instead as grounds for arguing in favour for ever more corporate social responsibility, in ever more managerial ways, including an emphasis on metrics and measurement. Overall, this leaves the book incomplete, in that it provides a somewhat partisan, unduly favourable and un-critical historical account of philanthropy or corporate social responsibility in India. However, there is now enough critical scholarship both within business and management studies, and also outside it, in geography, cultural anthropology, communication and media studies, environmental and development studies and so forth, which has provided rich material, including that on India, which Sundar has conveniently disregarded. While this is only to be expected given that the book is singularly orientated towards inspiring the next generation of business leaders and managers and policymakers to take up ever more corporate social responsibility, it provides a limited, and smoothed-over account of corporate social responsibility in India.
The book would have been helped immensely, both in terms of its scholarly and popular contribution, if it had engaged, more and critically, with the failures or disengagement of business with society. In this, it is worth remembering Foucault’s (1988) suggestion on Practicing Criticism, which suggests
We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against […] A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest […] Thought exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is something that is often hidden […] Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult […] [A]s soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible. (pp. 154–155)
And the role of the intellectual, it is further outlined, is ‘to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality’ (Foucault, 1988: 155). It is this critical scholarship and such an intellectual that is required, particularly now and in India, which stands at interesting, but somewhat distressing, junctures of unresolved contradictions. It might be worthwhile to point out some of the possible questions that Sundar ought to have engaged with in producing a more critical, and somewhat uneven, narrative that would have moved the field(s) forward.
What sets Sundar’s work apart from existing scholarship on corporate social responsibility is, first, its historical scope, and second, its attention to a uniquely Indian tradition of corporate social responsibility. However, apart from references to philanthropy in religion, particularly among Hinduism that Sundar covers, and later in terms of the contribution of businesses to the Indian national movement, there is no further discussion on the Indian tradition of corporate social responsibility. This becomes most striking when Sundar is writing on corporate social responsibility in post-liberalisation India. As cultural studies scholars on and from India will now have us know, it is not as if the long-standing struggles over modernity have been resolved and the cultural worlds suitably reconfigured. Thus, on whether the neo-liberal globalisation post-1991 has meant a complete disjunction from the earlier religious, and later colonialist, and still later nationalist, philanthropy remains unattended in Sundar’s work. One would have preferred a more nuanced writing on what, if anything, remains of this uniquely Indian corporate social responsibility. Similarly, Sundar would have done well to research and write on the (dis)continuities of religious giving in post-liberalisation, globalising India with its claims of political flattening and cultural homogenisation of the world. If religion is central to Indian giving, as Sundar tells us, it might have also been useful to discuss the contradictions and problems of such philanthropy, ensconced in religion and relying on ideas of charity and karma, and its tensions with liberal, individualistic conception of the rights-bearing citizen.
Sundar cites the work of historian Douglas Haynes on Surti merchants and philanthropy as means of earning and maintaining one’s abru (reputation and worthiness), but fails to discuss what Haynes (1987) wrote at the end of his essay, ‘by conspicuous involvement in culturally valued forms of giving, businessmen can frequently transform the resources they possess in great abundance – their wealth – into reputations as moral and responsible individuals and into political influence’ (p. 358). Particularly in societies which ‘militate against profit taking and the accumulation of capital’ (Haynes, 1987: 358); and so in rural India, for example, where capitalist modernity is not entirely complete, what are the ways by which philanthropy helps businesses legitimate themselves in the present times. Thus, there was an excellent opportunity to discuss the ways in which the pre-modern ideas of abru among the elite Indian merchants play with (or against) the current critical scholarship on corporate social responsibility as means of earning licences for conducting one’s businesses. This would have been particularly helpful when speaking of Vedanta’s (mis)adventures in Niyamgiri, Odisha, which Sundar has also discussed at some length. One last, and perhaps most significant, point that Sundar fails to engage with in her work relates to the nature, more specifically limited nature, of such corporate-sponsored social action. Surely, vested self-interest and corporate branding, concepts common in mainstream business and management education and practice, where Sundar seems most comfortable in drawing from, would impose a limit on the imaginaries and nature of social action itself. And therefore, if the solution, as Sundar tells us, is to have ever more good corporate social responsibility, it would mean having to live with silence when it comes to more imaginative, critical and, now much needed, voices for social change.
There are also a number of other things that Sundar ought to have paid more attention to. Given the somewhat ambitious scope of the book, that is, in attempting to write a singular comprehensive history of business–society relationship in India, from colonial to post-colonial and now neo-liberal India, Sundar has done well to compile material from a range of sources, across time and genres. However, the logic behind the periodisation (1850–1914, 1914–1960, 1960–1990 and 1990 up to the present day) used by Sundar is not entirely clear. Even though the logic of the latter periodisation, particularly post-liberalisation, is somewhat self-evident, the significance of the first two classificatory periods is neither explained by the author nor evident in her profiling of philanthropy before and after. Perhaps, dispensing away with periodisation and thinking of history, not in terms of grand events and milestones, but continuities, transitions and disruptions, might have helped the author in telling this historical account of businesses’ social responsibility in India. There is also an error in the periodisation. While the introductory chapter suggests 1850–1914 and 1914–1960 as the first two classificatory periods, the corresponding chapters’ titles suggest 1850–1941 and 1941–1960. Also, the book would have been helped immensely with closer attention to footnotes and referencing, particularly for the more interested and advanced readers. For example, pages 98–102 cover the sites of early philanthropy and philanthropists in India; however, there are no specific sources indicated in the text. There are a number of places within the book, where one would have preferred to know the specific sources from which Sundar has drawn her material. This lack of details on sources, as any reader and author of historiography would know, is unacceptable.
Overall, while Sundar must be commended for her historical approach to a somewhat under-researched area of philanthropy in India; more critical engagement with the subject beyond descriptive accounts could have helped move the field forward.