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Legitimating corporate global irresponsibility: Origins, contexts and vectors of the market modern newspeak

Bernard Sionneau (BeM Bordeaux Management School, Toulouse, France Groupe de Recherche sur la Sécurité et la Gouvernance (GRSG), Toulouse, France)

Journal of Global Responsibility

ISSN: 2041-2568

Article publication date: 15 October 2010

707

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to explain why and how, in the USA, a very particular interpretation of economic liberalism, faring though different historical contexts, has generated, since the 1970s, a new kind of capitalism whose language, logic, legitimating paradigm and associated practices have become, thanks to “organic intellectuals” and active networks of power and influence, the “newspeak” and compass of chief executive officers from around the world, despite their always direst societal consequences.

Design/methodology/approach

Using history as a support to investigate the domestic and international relations contexts that bore financialized globalization, the paper is strongly located into political sociology. As such, and if we consider that political sociology is the “science of power”, the paper tries to identify precisely the networks of power and influence which transformed a specific interpretation of liberalism and business into a dominant paradigm and specific kind of capitalism, in the USA and the rest of the world. The approach helps to understand which sets of ideas and authors were deemed worth supporting by business and political networks of power and influence and how both sides drew on their reciprocal resources to transform their cosmogonies into dominant paradigms and real politics (corporate and States).

Findings

The paper provides a global but precise understanding of the complex processes that allowed some vested interests to impose their vision of economics and business on a domestic, then world, scale. It also questions the relevancy of that vision according to a presentation of the negative societal externalities the associated policies generated and according to the official investigations that have been conducted on the corporate and banking misdemeanors that it contributed to generate.

Practical implications

The paper illustrates a method of investigation that can be used to develop the “global view”, a prerequisite to making decisions in full knowledge of causes and consequences and thus a means to train future “globally responsible leaders”.

Social implications

By revealing the hidden interests behind financialized globalization and the societal consequences of their power plays, the paper indirectly demonstrates the urgent need for an “alter‐economy” geared to meet the fundamental needs of societies and to preserve their natural environment in the long term.

Originality/value

The paper offers a different perspective on economics and business which is seldom presented in business schools where, owing to the discussed dominant ideology, politics is considered irrelevant to understand business and economics and where the latter are nearly always presented as vectors of good.

Keywords

Citation

Sionneau, B. (2010), "Legitimating corporate global irresponsibility: Origins, contexts and vectors of the market modern newspeak", Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 330-365. https://doi.org/10.1108/20412561011079434

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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