Corporate Social Responsibility -The Failing Discipline and Why it Matters for International Relations

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is failing at the very time it is emerging as a new discipline. This has implications not only for CSR itself, but also other disciplines wanting to understand the role of the private sector in the global political economy. This article highlights some of the evidence for this failure, but more significantly shows how it is rooted in an orthodoxy that the discipline has created but is unable to examine. As a result, CSR treats as ideationally and historically neutral particular concepts and practices that define what business’s relationship with wider society can mean. The article uses the perspectives of different social science disciplines to reveal the structural dimensions to CSR and some of their consequences. It proposes an alternative analytical framework for use by CSR and as an entry point for international relations and other disciplines wanting to understand the ways in which business shapes and responds to globalisation and influences the possibilities of contemporary society and governance.