Abstract
I am involved with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) from several aspects – as a researcher and a PhD student, as a lecturer and as a practitioner. So, when I saw a blurb for ‘CSR as a Management Idea’, I was excited to finally see a book that promised to challenge the unproblematised approach to CSR in the dominant literature.
I was satisfied with the way some of the blurb promises were kept, but also deeply disappointed with the way the main premise of the book – that CSR is another management idea – was dealt with.
I’d like to start this review with the main positive aspect of this book. The book presents a detailed case of CSR practice in Sweden/Swedish companies. As a practitioner, it was refreshing to learn that the experiences of conflict and confusion are shared by other CSR practitioners/mangers. The direct practitioner’s view, as presented by Tommy Borglund in Chapter 6, is a view from inside the practice, which is a rarity in the dominant CSR discourse.
The blurb claims to demonstrate ‘how CSR standards are set and spread’. Chapter 4 aims to extensively discuss the organisations that set formal standards. However, the editors seem to ignore that discussing WHO sets the standards is not the same as discussing HOW the standards are set. WHO is a stage in the process of HOW. And HOW is missing from that chapter and indeed from the book itself. The process of setting the standards is presented as one-directional – there are standard-setters, as givers/imposers of standards, and there are the companies that receive them. There is no acknowledgement that the process of standard setting is complex and that the practitioners, through their practice, are active contributors, as well as the public, media and the governments, to that dialectical process. There is also no acknowledgment that this process is ongoing, and it does not end with the standards being set, and that the standards are constantly reviewed and revised, as a result of this complex web of participating actors. On pages 65 to 66, for example, there is a brief mentioning of a 10th principle added to Global Compact, but no discussion of how this addition came about.
The book’s main claim to contribution is the implied promise to expand the discussion of CSR as a management idea. In my view, this promise is not upheld. First, it would be very useful to expand the discussion of what a ‘management idea’ is. This is missing from the book. On page 2, there is a brief definition of a ‘management idea’ as ‘a model for directing the activities of companies and other organizations’. This definition is too vague, and therefore is meaningless. This definition can be applied to any activity of an organisation – from marketing, through accounting to strategy. But no one would argue that strategy, for example, is a management idea. A reader is led to believe that Chapter 2 would deal with the concept of ‘management ideas’. But the chapter addresses specific management ideas, and how the ideas are diffused, rather than conceptualising the notion itself.
Furthermore, Jutterström and Norberg suggest that CSR is a management idea based on the similarities with popular management ideas. This is a weak argument. The book itself presents a list of differences between CSR and management ideas (pp. 30–32, 168–176). If similarities lead to declaring CSR as a management idea, surely the differences should lead to rejecting this premise. Especially in light of the overarching difference presented in the book, CSR is the only ‘management idea’ dealing with the interrelationships of business and society. Although throughout the book, CSR is being addressed as a ‘management idea’, this claim is not successfully defended.
Based on the claim that CSR is a management idea, the authors also criticise the need for CSR theories and concepts (p. 30). But they conclude the book with the claim that ‘further research on operationalization of CSR is needed, preferably also dealing with questions of the generalization of the concept’. The authors seem to contradict themselves.
The discussion of the concept of CSR (Chapter 3) is very limited. The blurb claims that the book will be ‘invaluable to researchers, practitioners and students of more advanced courses in management and business ethics’. I argue that the literature review in Chapter 3, by attempting to appeal to the three audiences, delivers to none. From a researchers’ perspective, there is no new conceptualisation of CSR. From a students’ perspective, the discussion presents a very limited picture, proliferating the portrayal of Milton Friedman as a chief objector to CSR, and ignoring Friedman’s statement that companies should maximise their profits ‘while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom’ (Friedman, 1970). The practitioners, from my experience, are less interested in theory. But the claim that ‘we have presented a general picture of the uses and meaning of CSR’ (p. 41) misleads the practitioner, as the discussion does not present a general picture of uses, nor of meaning of CSR. The title of the chapter and the first paragraphs claim that ‘the chapter looks at CSR from a historical perspective’ (p. 36). Only on page 41, the reader understands that the discussion will focus on history of CSR in Sweden.
In addition to the limitation of Chapter 4 that I discussed earlier, the theoretical or practical contribution of this chapter is not clear. This chapter can fall under the rubric of ‘data analysis’, which should be followed by ‘discussion’. The discussion is not developed in this chapter. There is a presentation of the statistics on ‘standard-setters’, but no discussion of the meaning of statistics. The ‘closer look’ at three standard-setters is not developed into a meaningful discussion, and it is not clear why those three cases were chosen, and how they relate to each other. This chapter also seems to contradict the claim that CSR is a management idea by emphasising the profusion of standards.
The following chapter also contradicts that claim. If ‘(p)revious research on management ideas and their relation to the consultancy industry has above all highlighted how consultants have contributed, in the initial stage, to the emergence and diffusion of ideas’ (p. 75), and if ‘global idea of CSR has shaped the market for professional services’ (p. 76), surely this indicates that CSR is not a management idea.
As with Chapter 4, Chapter 5 provides an overview of the field, but theoretical or practical contribution is limited. This weakness is even more noticeable in light of the very useful insights provided in Chapter 6.
Those insights and important empirical contribution are also found in Chapters 7–9. Empirical research into operationalisation of CSR is limited, and I suggest that the main contribution of this book is the followings area: insights into particularisation, or as the editors say ‘translation’, of the general and very vague CSR concepts, which are missing from the mainstream CSR literature. It is also very unusual to find discussions of the conflicts and difficulties of practising CSR in the dominant discourse. Therefore, the discussion in this book provides a highly desirable point of view. I believe that the CSR practitioners will find those chapters illuminating and resonating with their experiences, as did I.
The final chapters aim to support the claim of CSR as a management idea, but this attempt, in my view, is not successful, for the same reasons it was not successful in the first part of the book. Those chapters build on the same premise – that CSR is a management idea, but no additional theoretical or empirical support to this claim is provided. On the contrary, the discussion in pages 174 to 176 directly contradicts this claim. The book ends with a ‘call for more research’ into ‘what constitutes a management idea’. I propose that this should have been a starting point of the book.
Based on this brief discussion above, I suggest that the book, especially the second part (Chapters 6–9), is of considerable value to practitioners and of some empirical value to researchers. I also suggest that, unfortunately, the theoretical value of the book is limited. For that reason, I would not recommend this book to the students on general management courses, only to students on advanced courses dealing with ‘business in society’ topics. I would definitely recommend the book to the practitioners, and would strongly advise the researchers to consider the empirical chapters.