Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Citation

Mesure, H. and Leca, B. (2009), "Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", Society and Business Review, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 163-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680910977226

Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee is a Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Research in the College of Business at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He started his professional life as sales manager during five years for Rhone Poulenc before to switch towards a scholar carrier. Banerjee has above all published in the top management review such as Organizational Studies, Human Relations or Journal of Business Research. His main field of researches are: corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder theory; organizational sustainability; indigenous enterprise development and governance. His publications belong rather to the critical approach of management. Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is his first book.

CSR has become an increasingly popular notion and subject of interest in the community of organizational researchers with an increasing exposure in top tier journals and conferences themes often revolving around those issues. It is interesting to notice for instance that the academy of management, arguably the most important conference in the field, had themes over the last years such as “Doing Well by Doing Good” (2007) and “Green Management Matters” (2009). One possible explanation of such enthusiasm might be that CSR allows to present corporations as agents of positive social change despite little evidences, and provides organizational researchers with a sense that they can make a positive difference by researching and promoting CSR. Logically, little critical research exists that challenge this consensual notion. Indeed, it might well be that when coming to CSR, we traded academic rigor for convenience. Because Bobby Banerjee challenges the notion of CSR and throw a critical eye at it, his book is an important read for any academic having an interest for CSR, and more generally to anyone who might have an interest for the possibility for organizational studies to lead to positive social change while being skeptical about what has been achieved so far.

Banerjee's book intends to investigate (p. 2) the link between the Good (what CSR discourses tell us about why corporations should be accountable to the broader society and what corporations should do to be responsible), the Bad (what those ideas and discourses conceal – how the imperatives of profit accumulation and shareholder value maximization often lead to dispossession and how the dominant model marginalizes millions of people in the world) and the Ugly (how corporations and governments create an illusory perception of good when describing the bad) and how CSR contributes to this. Related to this, Banerjee questions the capacity of corporations under their current form to achieve meaningful social outcomes and provides evidences that CSR can be used as a way to reduce democratic and legal control and replace it by what is essentially corporations' goodwill to be socially responsible, thus contributing to enforcement of the dominant neo liberal agenda rather than to significant social change. This reflection is informed by a critical analysis of the existing academic literature on CSR, as well as by many empirical cases.

After an introduction, the book runs on nine chapters. Chapter 1 is an historical review of the CSR. It gives the opportunity to Banerjee to story the emergence of corporations in the USA, the distrust of the founding fathers for those structures and the severe restrictions on their activities. In particular, Banerjee reminds the reader of the initial mandatory obligation to serve the public interest to keep its franchise. He also accounts for the contingent evolution and power relations that eventually led to the emergence of the current dominant view of corporations as nexus of contracts designed to enhance shareholders value.

Chapter 2 focuses on theoretical perspectives of CRS. Banerjee shows how the diverse theoretical perspectives on CSR followed the evolution of gig firms in USA and how the dominant CSR paradigm turn from as obligation of civic virtue in the 1950s to CSR as strategy since the 1980s.

Chapters 3 and 4 pay special attention to two most prominent current theoretical perspectives on CSR: the stakeholders' theory and corporate citizenship (CS). Banerjee offers critical presentations of those approaches pointing out their shortcomings. Most notably, Banerjee underlines that both stakeholders' theory and CS revolve around the views and interests of corporations rather than communities. The common “business” CRS discourses argues that there is a convergence between the corporations and the communities (as corporations' environment) interests. Banerjee shows the contrary. Referring to the practices of the mining industry toward indigenous communities in Australia, he demonstrates that the power to define stakeholders and take action essentially lies in the company. Indigenous communities do not just have the choice to refuse the development of their land. They are compelled to become stakeholders and are thus completely depend on what corporations will decide. Since those communities have no power to influence corporations or governments, and no communication skills to raise the salience of their problems into the broader society, or it is very likely that they will receive little or no attention. Corporate citizenship raises comparable issues. In both cases, it is eventually a power relation between dominant corporations and dominated communities and citizens. While the issues raised by those theories are important, the current responses are unsatisfying.

Looking at the dilemmas of CSR and corporate citizenship in practice in Chapter 5, Banerjee concludes that “without a legally binding mechanism, CSR and citizenship initiatives can only allow activities that benefit the corporation instead of addressing issues of global poverty and sustainable development” (p. 65). And CSR appears as it is rhetoric of corporate domination.

Chapters 6 and 7 widen the debate by considering discourses on sustainability and human rights. Banerjee suggests that those issues have been framed through a neo liberal framework by governments – mostly from developed countries – international organizations and corporations. Society issues are handled through the paradigm of property rights. Therefore, governing and managing are the art to hierarchy the property rights of the stakeholders knowing that some are more owner or more powerful than others. Biodiversity is used as a vivid example of how property rights are promoted as a way to manage biodiversity conservation and eventually serve the appropriation of genetic resources by governments and corporations to the expense of the rural poor and indigenous communities. Complex cultural, social, ecological issues are reduced to the sole economic rationality, leading to the privatization of commons and the destruction of livelihoods.

Chapter 8 intends to outline the general political economy of CSR. The author enters into a discussion of the complex interplay between the nexus of relationship of actors like governments, international organizations, NGOs, and the dominant neo liberal discourse. Trying to tackle such a vast and complex problem in a limited number of pages might be too much to achieve. It might be frustrating to the reader that this general model and account of the political economy of CSR, which is the underlying explanatory mechanism for what was exposed in the previous chapters is not more detailed. While Banerjee provides the reader with solid references to pursue the exploration of this political economy, the book might have gain from a deeper and longer analysis of the mechanisms outlined here.

Chapter 9 explores the alternatives solutions that can be proposed in order to avoid the predation of the world by corporation. This chapter emphasizes two recurrent themes: democracy and accountability. Banerjee suggests that in order to achieve this we need to rethink the ontology of corporations, imagine a different form of corporation and its role in the society. Emphasizing the primacy of public interest over those of shareholders, Banerjee suggests that social movements can be instrumental to push this crucial change. Operationalizing this view implies to set legally binding mechanisms expanding the fiduciary duties of a corporation and setting a more democratic mode of governing the corporation that combines public and private interests (p. 166).

This book has many merits. It should constitutes a fascinating reading for the increasing number of organizational scholars who wonder how organizational research can engage more in accounting for the impact of corporations on their environment in a large sense. While being written by an organizational researcher, this book addresses the large picture, insisting on the need to move beyond a solely economic vision of corporations and to bring back in social, political and ecological dimensions, not as mere secondary dimensions but as central ones. On that point, this book is very Australian. Banerjee suggests that corporations support laws extending the boundaries of the market logic to new domains such as natural biodiversity nature and reject laws making them accountable for their actions, using as CSR and linked promises of self‐regulations as arguments to avoid such regulations, offers a fascinating case that might deserve further research. Hence, Banerjee's book contributes to reconnect research in management with the largest discussion in social sciences on the current role and influence of corporations. Banerjee is also hopefully likely to become an important reference for CSR scholars. We would suggest that Banerjee's work should be considered as central to any further serious development on CSR.