Corporate social responsibility and the parameters of dialogue with vulnerable others

Abstract

This article presents a case study of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others. Dialogue with marginalized external groups is increasingly presented in the business literature as the key to making corporate social responsibility possible in particular through corporate learning. Corporate public communications at the same time promote community engagement as a core aspect of corporate social responsibility. This article examines the possibilities for and conditions underpinning corporate dialogue with marginalized stakeholders as occurred around the unexpected and sudden closure in January 2009 of the AU$2.2 billion BHP Billiton Ravensthorpe Nickel mine in rural Western Australia. In doing so we draw on John Roberts’ notion of dialogue with vulnerable others, and apply a discourse analysis approach to data spanning corporate public communications and interviews with residents affected by the decision to close the mine. In presenting this case study we contribute to the as yet limited organizational research concerned directly with marginalized stakeholders and argue that corporate social responsibility discourse and vulnerable other dialogue not only affirms the primacy of business interests but also co-opts vulnerable others in the pursuit of these interests. In conclusion we consider case study implications for critical understandings of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others.

This article offers a critical case study of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others employing a discourse analysis approach. It does so in the context of a pervasive concern in academic debate around corporate social responsibility (CSR), namely its business-centrism (see, for example, Broomhill, 2007; Doane, 2005; Fougere and Solitander, 2009; Godfrey and Hatch, 2007) and associated though under-addressed dimensions of corporate power (Banerjee, 2008; Bendell and Bendell, 2007; Broomhill, 2007). The centrality of business is broadly manifest in hegemonic emphases, in both academic and business CSR literature, on CSR as a means to achieve competitive advantage, for example through protecting brand and other assets, maintaining control over the parameters of responsibility, defusing critique, and avoiding regulation (Doane, 2005; Fougere and Solitander, 2009; Kapelus, 2002). Privileging the interests of business has been convincingly critiqued as resulting, at best, in minimally-productive CSR (for example, Hanlon, 2008; Roberts, 2003). What amounts to an obsession with win-win situations and the underpinning rationale that corporations will do good in order to help themselves do well fundamentally curtails the possibilities for CSR (Banerjee, 2007). Importantly, aligning ‘good business’ and social responsibility both legitimates and consolidates corporate power (Banerjee, 2008).

Increasingly, stakeholder dialogue is privileged in CSR strategies and in the academic literature as the means to overcome what is in the process rejected as an inherent tension or contradiction between ‘doing good’ and ‘doing well’ (Burchell and Cook, 2006; Deetz, 2007; van Huijstee and Glasbergen, 2008). Dialogue, broadly defined in the literature as open and interactive communication, is postulated as central to organizational learning and to creative problem solving whereby CSR can be realized (Burchell and Cook, 2006; Deetz, 2007; van Huijstee and Glasbergen, 2008). Deetz (2007: 277), for example, argues that CSR is made ‘possible’ through greater attention to participatory communication ‘processes that use situations of conflict and difference to generate creative win-win responses’ (Deetz, 2007: 277).

Others have argued that physical proximity is necessary to achieving CSR. Jensen et al. (2009: 542) for example have called for ‘actual encounters with those covered or silenced’ by CSR policies and codes. More specifically, John Roberts (2003: 249) argues for the importance of face-to-face dialogue across the corporate boundary ‘with those most vulnerable to the effects of corporate conduct’. In Roberts’ formulation (2003: 261) ‘vulnerable others’ are those who are not answerable to the corporation as are employees or suppliers. They are thus beyond the corporate boundary defined in turn as ‘the limits of its systems of accountability’ and ‘of its knowledge of itself and its effects’ (2003: 261). Vulnerable others accordingly have nothing to gain from telling the corporation what it wants to hear, as opposed to employees and suppliers for example, and are therefore more likely to help the corporation learn of its ‘actual myriad effects’ (Roberts, 2003: 264). In addition, Roberts’ (2003: 262) contends that vulnerable others may have a great deal at stake and a ‘felt urgency’ to make the corporation aware of its effects as they experience them. The resultant ‘simple displacement of corporate ignorance’ (Roberts, 2003: 262), best achieved in encounters motivated by this urgency, he argues is central to making ‘a reality of corporate social responsibility’ (p. 264).

Our case study offers empirical insights into the possibilities for and parameters of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others, in particular as proposed by Roberts. In doing so, we respond to Godfrey and Hatch’s (2007: 93) call for attention to ‘the specific actions, policies, or activities’ through and in which corporate social responsibility is ‘concretely’ executed. Importantly, while arguments are made for dialogue and or face-to-face encounters with stakeholders and/or vulnerable others as the key to realizing CSR as discussed above, there is as yet a limited body of work undertaking empirical analysis of such engagement (Burchell and Cook, 2006) and even less organizational research concerned directly with non-‘traditional’ stakeholders (Jonker and Foster, 2002). As Banerjee (2008: 73) has argued, critical examination of corporate-stakeholder relationships is necessary if we are ‘to make corporate social responsibility work for society and not just for corporations’.

Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation: case study background

We interrogate corporate dialogue with vulnerable others centred around the development and subsequent sudden closure of the AU$2.2 billion BHP Billiton Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation (RNO) in rural Western Australia just eight months after the official opening. This residential mining operation was deeply embedded in local communities: the mine site was located in the heart of a small farming community and a large number of mine workers and their families moved to nearby Hopetoun where they came to constitute the majority population. As a result, the presence of the mine brought about wide-reaching, though unevenly-experienced, social, environmental and economic change in the Shire (Mayes, 2008). Announced the day after a ‘record-breaking’ production achievement (RNO, 2009), and in the context of repeated official assurances of a 20–25 year operational lifespan (see, for example, RNO, 2008a), the closure came as a profound shock to the local communities and mine workforce. Immediately following announcement of the indefinite suspension of the mine at an early morning ‘safety’ meeting (RNO, 2009), workers were sent home en-masse in a well-planned exodus. Mine and other plant closures are widely reported as having extensive social impacts and as a difficult transition period for both corporate management and local communities (Haney and Shkaratan, 2003; Neil et al., 1992). These impacts were very evident in the Ravensthorpe closure (Pini et al., 2010). Indeed, the local newspaper characterized the community as attempting to cope with a ‘devastating’ event (Dunn Street Party, 2009). In the words of a resident in our interview sample: ‘You know that first week here it was, you know, people were just crying in the streets’.

This local experience of intense vulnerability to the actions of BHP Billiton and attendant ‘felt urgency’ for dialogue with the corporation, along with the proximity of the mine and its management to those directly affected by the operation and its sudden closure, provides a rich opportunity for empirical analysis of corporate-vulnerable other relations in conditions similar to the ideal proposed by Roberts. The case study encompasses a range of corporate public communications and in-depth interviews with local vulnerable others. We begin with a discussion of vulnerable others in relation to stakeholder models followed by an outline of our discourse analysis approach. This approach, we argue, foregrounds the social construction of cognitive and practical/material parameters of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others in terms of its meanings, objects and subject positions. We then explain our methodology before turning to the case study data. Analysis focuses, firstly, on BHP Billiton discourse and the construction of the terms of engagement with vulnerable others. Secondly, we examine vulnerable other perspectives and subjectification to/within this discourse. In conclusion we consider case study implications for critical understandings of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others, in particular as a means to ‘make CSR possible’.

Stakeholder models and the position(ing) of vulnerable others

The concept of ‘stakeholder’ is relevant to an understanding of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others not least in that stakeholder models originated as a way of expanding business models to include external parties (Banerjee, 2008; Jonker and Foster, 2002). Indeed, as Mitchell et al. (1997) point out, the academic and business literature, following Freeman’s (1984) influential definition, largely conceives CSR as fundamentally concerned with identifying and responding to stakeholders defined as groups or individuals who can either affect or are affected by corporate actions in pursuit of its objectives. Two fundamental stakeholder types emerge: ‘voluntary stakeholders’ who ‘bear some form of risk as a result of having invested some form of capital, human or financial, something of value in a firm’ and ‘involuntary stakeholders’ who are ‘at risk as a result of a firm’s activities’ (Clarkson, 1994:5). In this way vulnerable others are seemingly accounted for in stakeholder theory and models.

However, ‘stakeholder’, as a foundational CSR concept, object and subject position, is critically inadequate (Bannerjee, 2007, 2008; Roberts, 2003). For example, stakeholder theory according to Mitchell et al’s (1997: 855) widely adopted schema (Parent and Deephouse, 2007) is concerned with establishing a normative typology of stakeholders and specifying ‘how and under what circumstances managers can and should respond to various stakeholder types’. In their framework, stakeholder ‘salience’ is determined by legitimacy (according to business); urgency (for business) and power (ability to affect business). Importantly, power remains the core attribute (Frooman, 1999; Parent and Deephouse, 2007). In this business-centric approach, vulnerable others, with a limited ability to affect the firm, are unlikely to (nor should they) receive much managerial attention. Further, knowledge of and engagement with stakeholders is sought as a means to better ‘understand and manage stakeholder behaviour’ (Frooman, 1999: 191) as opposed to better understand social consequences of, or responsibilities inherent in, corporate behaviour (Banerjee, 2008). Managing stakeholder relationships frequently involves seeking win-win outcomes, predicated on the assumption that it is possible and sufficient for corporations to do good by doing well (Banerjee, 2007; Doane, 2005; Fougere and Solitander, 2009). As a result, stakeholder theory and models serve to both limit stakeholder interests and modulate behaviour, and are especially inadequate when engaging with marginalized/ vulnerable stakeholders as Subhabrata Banerjee (2007; 2008) has convincingly demonstrated. In this context, Roberts’ (2003: 261) in contrast offers face-to-face dialogue with vulnerable others as a means for corporations to engage with ‘different others who are themselves most vulnerable to the effects of corporate conduct’.

At the same time, stakeholder models, as attested in corporate publications and academic research (Burchell and Cook, 2006; Deetz, 2007), are widely entrenched in organizations around the globe as a means to engage with those both voluntarily and involuntarily affected by a firm’s actions. BHP Billiton, for example, conceptualizes and positions those vulnerable others ‘affected by our operations’ as stakeholders. Moreover, corporations increasingly lay claim to ‘successful’ communication with vulnerable others as is evident, for example, in celebratory descriptions of engagement with affected local communities featured in countless corporate and industry peak-body CSR communications.

Discourse and the parameters of dialogue

Importantly, ‘dialogue’, whether mobilized around the concept of ‘stakeholders’ or ‘vulnerable others’ is discursively produced: in short, discourse informs who may speak, when, how, of what and where—all of which are central to the possibilities for and of dialogue. Discourse shapes the meanings, objects and subject positions in a range of corporate relations/dialogues with external others such as, for example, around environmental concerns and crisis response (see Livesey and Graham, 2007). Central to our discourse analysis approach is a long-established understanding of discourse as ‘a system of representation’ encompassing both language and action, and which ‘defines and produces the objects of our knowledge’ (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000; Fairclough, 1999; Hall, 1997: 72; van Dijk, 1993). Further to this is the recognition that discursive production spans core, analytically-distinguishable components of social life, namely ‘representations of the world; social relations between people; and people’s social and personal identities’ (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 273). Approaching this production in terms of concepts, objects and subject positions, as Phillips and Hardy’s (1997) work on the UK refugee system demonstrates, highlights interrelations among texts and practices along with the distribution of power and opportunities for resistance.

The performance of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others is both enabled and constrained in and through systems of representations in which the concept/meaning of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others, the objects of that communication (stakeholders, host community), and attendant subject positions are constructed. Corporate communications such as the community newsletters, are both part of the discursive system of representation of what constitutes dialogue and appropriate/desirable objects and subject positions, thus shaping face-to-face encounters, and at the same time are part of the dialogue with the local community. As elaborated by Phillips and Hardy (1997: 167) ‘concepts’, such as ‘stakeholder’, are historically [and culturally] contingent ideas, categories and theories ‘through which we understand the world and relate to one another’. Closely interrelated with concepts, ‘objects’ are ‘part of the practical order’ (Philips and Hardy, 1997: 168) as material manifestations of concepts. For example, ‘stakeholder’ is a concept mobilized in dominant discourses of CSR whereas a local resident affected by corporate action can be seen as an embodiment of this concept, and thus an object of CSR discourse.

Without ascribing ‘too much power to discourse’ in that we cannot know how audiences ‘read’ given texts just as individuals actively select and deploy a range of discourses (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000: 1129), we note that in order to participate in dialogue actors are required to take up subject positions (from which one can speak, interpret and act in intelligible modes) made available by a given discourse. Vulnerable other dialogue with BHP Billiton thus requires the adoption of a subject position intelligible within BHP Billiton CSR discourse. In limiting and circumscribing available subject positions discourse informs participant experiences and actions (Phillips and Hardy, 1997: 169). That is, in order to take up the subject position of ‘stakeholder’, for example, it is necessary to both understand (master) dominant CSR/BHP Billiton stakeholder concepts and practices and to submit to these concepts and practices. Importantly, in the process, ‘discourse captures producer as effectively as participants and audience’ (Phillips and Hardy, 1997:169).

Crucially, as Judith Butler (1997: 11 emphasis in original) has argued in extending Foucault’s work, subjection is both ‘a power exerted on a subject’ and ‘a power assumed by the subject’; this assumption ‘constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’. Subjection enacts an inevitable dependency on a discourse not of one’s choosing yet from which agency is derived. As Butler (1997:12) notes, the ‘agency of the subject appears to be an effect of its subordination. Any effort to oppose that subordination [this requires agency] will necessarily presuppose and invoke’ subordination. The impasse this suggests, she explains (1997:12), does not eventuate by virtue of discontinuities ‘between the power presupposed and the power reinstated’. Specifically, ‘Power acts on the subject in at least two ways: first, as what makes the subject possible, the condition of its possibility and its formative occasion, and second, as what is taken up and reiterated in the subject’s “own” acting’ (Butler, 1997:14).

A discourse analysis approach also addresses the dynamics of power in and over discourse wherein power is understood as exercised in the creation, (intertextual) modification, and dissemination of texts (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; van Dijk, 1997). For example, corporations exercise power over CSR discourse through widespread public dissemination of corporate concepts of social responsibility. This authority to define CSR is discursively naturalized in corporate texts as an outcome of voluntary corporate adoption of social responsibility. These corporate constructions are not uncontested; discourse analysis draws attention to both complicities and resistances as central to the ongoing construction of social realities (Mumby and Clair, 1997), and as necessary to understanding social power relations (van Dijk, 1993). RNO communications both reproduce corporate/BHP Billiton understandings of CSR and enact their application to and practice within the Ravensthorpe local communities affected by BHP Billiton actions, which in turn adopt, challenge or reject this understanding.

Methodology

Our case study consists of an assemblage of corporate public communications and semi-structured interviews with vulnerable others on the understanding that these texts and the experiences/perceptions of vulnerable others play important dialogic, though unevenly empowered, roles in defining and enacting corporate-vulnerable other dialogue. Corporate communications are approached as more than public relations talk in that, as Livesey and Graham (2007) have demonstrated in the case of corporate eco-talk, CSR language and symbolic action is constitutive of relationships to external parties. Corporate communication texts are ‘part of the very practice’ of hegemonic CSR (Fougere and Solitander, 2009: 219). The corporate texts examined here include BHP Billiton publications and those specifically produced by/for RNO and thus encode both broader company and site-specific constructions of vulnerable others and of dialogue. Our examination of these corporate communications has little to do with identifying and/or evaluating discrepancies between what is ‘said’ and what is ‘done’—important as these are—and is rather about the ways BHP Billiton in this specific instance produces and employs concepts, objects and subject positions in relation to dialogue with this specific vulnerable other. Corporate ‘dialogue’ is framed by BHP Billiton as ‘community engagement’ and is constituted, we argue, through community newsletters and also face-to-face encounters in committee and working group meetings for example. Given that ‘all signification is structured as dialogue’ (O’Sullivan et al., 1996: 87) and in line with our discourse approach, corporate texts are understood to be both generative of, and in dialogue with, a presumed addressee just as interview texts are in dialogue with CSR discourses and practices.

The documents examined are: the 2007 BHP Billiton Charter, BHP Billiton 2005 Sustainability Report which showcases RNO (in its development phase) as a ‘socio-economic case study’; BHP Billiton web pages devoted to ‘Working with Communities’ and to explaining ‘Social Responsibility: Our Approach’ (accessed 2009); BHP Billiton (2009) ‘Our Sustainability Framework’; the RNO recruitment brochure; the full set of twenty-five RNO ‘community newsletters’ published between December 2000 and September 2008; the corporate booklet distributed at the opening of the mine describing and celebrating the project and its development; and the BHP Billiton news release available on the day of closure. Systematic close-reading of these documents was undertaken to identify recurrent concepts, objects and subject positions offered in explanations and descriptions of CSR goals and practices.

The analysis draws equally on in-depth interviews with 23 local residents in February 2009, three weeks after the closure was announced/occurred. Interviews were semi-structured to allow participants to direct the content and emphases of the interview, thereby attempting to avoid prescriptive assumptions about what may or may not be of importance. Respondents were asked about their individual experiences of the closure and their perceptions of BHP Billiton engagement with the local community and individuals. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and subject to close-reading as undertaken with corporate documents. Interviewee selection was informed by prior knowledge of the community as incorporating long-term, pre-mine residents and a substantively larger number of newer residents who had joined the local community as a result of the presence of the mine. Employing contacts from prior research in the community, purposive sampling was used to canvas the experiences and perspectives of both pre-and post-mine residents affected by the mining operation and its closure. Overall, the sample encompasses those who had been directly and indirectly employed at the mine, and their spouses, along with non-mining residents. Of the 23 interviewees, eight were long-term pre-mine residents, one of whom had worked on the mine, and 15 were new residents (of two years or less) residing in the area as a result of mine-related employment. This latter group included ten ex-mine-employees, and three spouses with no history of employment at the mine.

Categorizing vulnerable others

Some of the ex-employees had received termination dates and redundancy arrangements, others had received notice of termination without a specific date, others were no longer employed on the RNO site but were hoping to hear of redeployment within the corporation, and others (contractors) had never worked directly for the company yet had work equipment retained on site at the corporation’s behest. Though categories of stakeholders, as documented in Broomhill (2007: 21) for example, suggest that employees and the local community in which a company operates are separate groups, this case study highlights the fluidity of such boundaries. The local community, post closure, included a large number of ex-employees and their families, many of whom also held community stakeholder positions such as community service worker. The multiple stakeholder positions experienced by many individuals challenges stakeholder models (Jonker and Foster, 2002) just as the shifting and variously constituted relationships many individuals may have with a corporation similarly challenges the viability of a pristine category of vulnerable others defined as, in Roberts’ formulation, those not answerable to the corporation. We argue that ex-employees are no longer answerable to BHP Billiton and thus qualify as vulnerable others. However, ex-employees seeking further work in mining may be accountable to the (in this case, close knit) industry if not the specific corporation. In addition, relatives of employees it can be argued may find themselves indirectly accountable to the corporation—a strong likelihood in a residential mining operation. Relatives of employees thus either muddy the ‘vulnerable other’ category or find themselves excluded. Similarly, local community vulnerable others may not be or feel accountable to BHP Billiton, for example, but may feel accountable to other community members who are accountable to, or benefit from corporate activity in the area. These ambiguities call into question the validity of the corporate boundary as yardstick for determining vulnerable other accountability and thus ‘freedom’ to make damaging effects known to the corporation (if not ability to undertake disinterested appraisal of such effects).

Corporate discourse: conceptualizing engagement

BHP Billiton and RNO public communications assert a consistent commitment to ‘community engagement’ described variously as ‘working with’ and/or ‘actively consulting’ the community. ‘Stakeholder Relationships’ are presented as a routine aspect of each mine operation: ‘Wherever we operate, we commit to engaging regularly, openly and honestly with the people interested in and affected by our operations’ (BHP Billiton, n.d.). This corporate concept of engagement thus broadly conforms to understandings of dialogue as open and interactive communication. Corporate benefits are enumerated explicitly as follows: ‘Without effective community engagement strategies and programs our operations may be left vulnerable to project approval delays, business disruptions and increased costs’ (BHP Billiton, n.d.). These benefits can be read as a sign of corporate commitment just as they signify the instrumental drivers/ends of such communication. Community engagement is also explicitly linked to the acquisition of a ‘social license to operate’, a core outcome of CSR as practiced by the mining industry (Jenkins, 2004; Kapelus, 2002; MCA, 2005). Corporate deployments of the social license to operate emphasize social acceptability as fundamental to conducting business (Banerjee, 2007). In mining industry communications the success of a given operation is constructed as dependent upon (unwritten) community acceptance if not approval, thus invoking corporate vulnerability and community power as opposed to community vulnerability and corporate power. This inversion is directly contradicted, for example, in that it falls to corporations to determine the existence of a social license just as its principal goal is corporate legitimation, in this case the legitimation of RNO’s presence in the community, rather than achieving social good or minimizing harm.

As the above makes clear, ‘engaging with communities’ is firmly situated as a central part of CSR and explicitly encompasses vulnerable others (‘those affected by our operations’). BHP Billiton and RNO documents concurrently employ five signifiers to define the object/s of this ‘community engagement’, namely: ‘the community’, ‘local community’, ‘communities in which we operate’, ‘stakeholder’, and ‘host community’. Throughout the documents, ‘communities in which we operate’ appears consistently, though less frequently than ‘the community’ and ‘local community’ which appear most often. ‘Stakeholder’ and ‘host community’ appear both frequently and consistently. All documents use the full range of these signifiers with the exception of the closure press release which, tellingly perhaps, refers to just ‘the local communities’. ‘Relationship building’ with vulnerable others, foregrounded as the ‘key to managing socio-economic impacts of the Ravensthorpe Nickel Project’ (BHP Billiton, 2005: 1) is characterized as involving ‘the creation of value for all parties’ in ‘win-win’ situations (see, for example, BHP Billiton, n.d.; Kloppers, 2007; Ravensthorpe Nickel Community Newsletters, 2007a, 2007b, 2008b). Indeed, ‘Regular, open and honest dialogue is the key to building win-win relationships’ (BHP Billiton, n.d.). The privileging of win-win relationships, potentially an extension of business-centric CSR win-win situations as noted earlier, means that if the corporation does not stand to win then a given relationship will not be supported, unobtrusively reinforcing/reproducing benefit to the corporation as the key factor informing dialogue with external others. Even if taken at its best to mean that the corporation will not proceed unless both it and the other party/ies ‘win’, benefit to the corporation remains a precondition. This schema limits the benefits to vulnerable others to those that also serve the interests of business while the use of win-win rhetoric, and broad reference to ‘the community’, implies that everyone’s interests are served anyway. In the process vulnerable others are positioned as mutual beneficiaries. This is aside from the fact that win-win outcomes can themselves be unethical (Nielsen, 2009) and that some can win more than others and may do so at the expense of others.

Importantly, win-win situations are to be achieved by ‘working together’ as partners. The following exemplary statement from the General Manager of RNO presents an (impossible) corporate aspiration the responsibility for which is to be shared by Ravensthorpe communities (resulting in what is implicitly assumed to be a win/win outcome):

Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation aspires to Zero Harm, not only to our people, but to our host communities and the environment. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to work in partnership with local communities to build a sustainable future. (RNO, n.d.: 7)

This oft repeated corporate vision substitutes a responsibility for or to the community with a shared responsibility with the community for an abstract goal/benefit clearly tied to RNO aspirations. Specifically, the parameters of dialogue with the community/vulnerable other are limited to the specific social relations implicit in ‘partnership’ and ‘working together’ to meet industry challenges, and through which inequalities in power are occluded (Banerjee, 2007). The RNO booklet published to coincide with the official opening of the mine in particular consistently positions the local communities as partners through explicit reference to ‘the local communities who have partnered with us’, ‘community partnerships’ and ‘work[ing] alongside our host communities’.

Overall, this corporate discourse of community engagement overwrites ‘vulnerable others’—external parties involuntarily affected by BHP Billiton business—with the objects and subject positions of ‘stakeholder’, ‘host’, and ‘partner’, just as it constructs the mining company as welcome/socially licensed ‘guest’ and ‘community partner’. These are not only interchangeable but also mutable objects which, with the possible exception of ‘stakeholder’ tend to downplay the standing of individuals in favour of amorphous collective identities. ‘Working together’, and attendant subjectification as partner, reconstitutes vulnerable others as voluntary stakeholders. Involuntary, at risk stakeholders, through the necessity of both identifying with and participating in making the mine successful, as specified in BHP Billiton/RNO discourse become investors of human capital. Two highly-involved interviewees, for instance, insisted that ‘the community took all the risks’. This emphasis on taking risks is very different to being at risk.

Corporate control

Further, corporate communications and practices consistently and exclusively foreground BHP Billiton and RNO control of this partnership as initiators of public forums, conveners of community groups and meetings, and architects of community relations plans all of which are derived directly and exclusively from corporate internal CSR policies. In the following corporate claim, circulated authoritatively to a broad industry, government and community audience at the official opening of the mine, the goal and content of dialogue is not only narrowed to improving/facilitating ‘the project’, but is also presented (if not normalized) in terms of forums initiated (and controlled) by the corporation:

In line with BHP Billiton’s approach to community engagement and involvement, Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation was keen to understand local concerns and values surrounding the development. Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation initiated forums that promoted a continuous exchange of ideas and expertise. Early into the process, community members demonstrated a willingness to explore opportunities to meet the social and environmental challenges presented by the project. (RNO, 2008a: 16)

The corporate objective of engagement with community members is not mutual understanding of the myriad effects the mine has upon the local community but, instead, is focused on ‘ideas’, ‘expertise’ and advancement of the RNO project. In constituting ‘partner/ship’ as a foundational relationship corporate discourse calls forth a seemingly empowered collective subject position through which the energies, knowledges and resources of local actors can be freely mobilized (Torfing, 2009) in the service of corporate aims (as opposed to, for example, in resistance to the corporation). Concurrently, ‘working together’ (and its connotations of a rational and mature approach), implicitly positions resistance as in opposition to both the corporation and the community. In this regard, a ‘Note from the Health, Safety, Environment and Community Manager’ (RNO, 2008b) is instructive:

[T]he communities of Ravensthorpe and Esperance shires have worked hard to make our people feel very welcome in their new surrounds and we would like to recognize the significant contribution that makes to the success we are seeing onsite.

The tri-annual newsletters constitute a disciplinary practice (Clegg, 1998) in that, as a core component of the BHP Billiton/RNO community engagement strategy, they naturalize the community as subject of/to corporate surveillance and identification /endorsement of appropriate behaviour. These newsletters not only reported on the mine’s progress, explained technical plant processes, and promoted the uses and importance of nickel; they also narrated corporate activities as partnerships in the community: for instance, ‘Ravensthorpe Nickel staff and local school students’ are described as having ‘join[ed] forces for national tree planting day’ (RNO, 2007b).

The newsletters further functioned to frame and control face-to-face dialogue with vulnerable others. For example, mine employees with face-to-face community liaison roles were introduced (via photograph and brief biography) and authorized as ‘key interface[s] between Ravensthorpe Nickel and the community’ (RNO, 2007b). The newsletters then provided a space for these employees to address the community. Similarly, local addressees were directed to ‘contact a CLC [Community Liaison Committee] member if you would like a specific question addressed’ (eg. RNO, 2007b; 2008a). This RNO convened and managed committee however was emphatically ‘not a lobby group’ (RNO, 2002: 3). With a membership of BHP Billiton staff and invited local community representatives and external consultants its task was to discuss ‘community wide issues rather than specific circumstances (such as a dust complaint which should be raised directly with RNO)’ (RNO, 2002: 3). Further, the CLC had no ‘direct decision control over matters within its terms of reference’ (RNO, 2002: 3). Several interviewees expressed the opinion that the CLC was a ‘PR exercise’ one function of which was to keep locals busy.

Post-closure engagement

The press release circulated to employees and community members on the day of closure was the last corporate public communication on the issue—the community newsletters, for example, did not continue beyond September 2008. This brief document (BHP Billiton, 2009) presented the closure as ‘largely the result of diminished profitability’ explaining that while ‘these decisions are never easy’ they are the ‘the consequence of our long held practice of continually reviewing all of our operations to ensure that they are competitive’. Thus, the rationality of shareholder interests and profit is upheld. From the announcement of closure onwards, BHP Billiton communication with those vulnerable to its actions, in practice, was limited to meeting contractual obligations. The closure press release statement that ‘BHP Billiton will work with suppliers, customers and the local communities to minimize the impact’ of closure, emphasizes contractual obligation and stakeholder hierarchy. Importantly, the relationship with local communities was further clarified:

We also recognize that the local communities will have concerns about how [closure] will impact them. We will honour any agreements we have made and continue to keep the communities updated throughout this process. (BHP Billiton, 2009)

In undertaking to keep the community informed, while simultaneously evincing no interest in learning what the impacts might be or how they can be ‘managed’ as a win-win situation, the corporation signals the local community’s immediate loss of (its limited) stakeholder salience. This occurs at the very moment of the community’s greatest and most urgent need for engagement more substantial than provision of rote information.

According to interviewees, a short-notice, invitation-only ‘community’ information session was held onsite on the afternoon of the closure. This meeting was attended by Shire Council representatives, fence-line neighbours of the mine, members of the two RNO-initiated ‘community’ groups, and a local Chamber of Commerce representative. BHP Billiton representatives on the other hand did not attend any of the public ‘whole of community’ meetings, as one interviewee described them. Another interviewee bitterly noted that in the weeks immediately following the closure:

All up I suppose we’ve had six to eight [public,] community meetings. Now I know for a fact that at none of these meetings was there any representation whatsoever from BHP. ¹ They refused to attend.

Interviewees stated that BHP Billiton justified this refusal on the grounds that the meetings would be ‘dysfunctional’, an assessment locally received as deeply insulting and lacking any understanding of the community. Rather, these public meetings were described by attending interviewees as restrained affairs in which people were ‘just saying, you know telling their story about they’re broke or whatever’. These meetings thus provided significant opportunities for the company to gain the sort of knowledge Roberts’ (2003) asserts is both crucial to CSR and available only from vulnerable others. While these meetings may well have been less restrained if BHP Billiton was represented, the company’s stated grounds for non-participation highlight confrontational and emotional contexts and perceived risks of face-to-face dialogue with vulnerable others, particularly in situations of ‘felt urgency’. Significantly, the intensity of the experience of vulnerable others (and assumptions around the unpredictable if not threatening behaviours it might provoke) is precisely the ground upon which dialogue is refused.

Further, BHP Billiton attendance would require and enact a (radical) shift away from the managerial/controlling corporate subject position encoded in the adoption of stakeholder frameworks. The imperative to manage, if not avoid engagement at this time can be seen in the locally disparaged corporate practice of bringing in staff not known in the community—strangers—to meet with select ‘small groups one on one’ such as ‘the executive of the Chamber of Commerce’. Interviewees facing forced relocation spoke of being given ‘a general HR number and email address’ but not having a contact person in the company, and of their repeated unsuccessful attempts to make contact with the company. Several described being given pre-prepared generic information rather than receiving answers to questions. BHP Billiton not only limited its interaction to selected ‘very small interest groups’ but also closely regulated these engagements, as noted in interviews:

in each of these interactions they have a very narrow focus. As soon as you say anything that is beyond the brief of that organization they say that’s not on the table, we’re not talking about that.

The corporation thus continued to determine not only who could speak but also what constituted permissible subject matter. This control can be seen as a further manifestation of the discursive construction of CSR and community engagement as something the corporation not only initiates but also manages. Interviewees commented that confidentiality agreements were made a condition of receipt of termination salary packages. By making ex-employees accountable to the firm, BHP Billiton sought to also contain unofficial dialogue.

The experiences of each of our interviewees, irrespective of past personal relationship/s to the mine or lack thereof, were pervasively coloured by a sense of marginalization, inability to make appropriate decisions about what to do next, and general uncertainty about the future as a result of this essentially faceless corporate insistence on rigid, highly contained unidirectional communication. In interviewees’ estimations, ‘BHP, they don’t talk to people’, and ‘personal-relations wise, they’ve been bullies’. Similarly, the donation of AU$100,000 to the CLC in the weeks following closure to be dispersed to the local community as this committee saw fit can also be seen as a means to avoid dialogue around community impacts. This paternalistic manifestation of economic power absolved the corporation of having to acknowledge or learn of its negative effects, just as this strategy functions to defuse criticism. According to an involved interviewee concerned that the committee was being ‘saddled’ with this task, ‘it was all part of [BHP Billiton’s] PR machine’ and ‘they will put out in all their information to their powers that be, we’re still communicating with the community’.

Vulnerable other evaluations of BHP Billiton engagement

Local evaluations of BHP Billiton engagement and interaction with company liaison staff at the time of closure indicate the complex nature of vulnerable other relationships with the corporation. The emphasis on honouring agreements is a retreat from CSR encoded in both wider societal and BHP Billiton-specific discourse as categorically more than compliance with regulatory frameworks. Interviewees reproduced the dominant corporate construction of CSR and evaluated the company accordingly:

If you haven’t got a legal, contractual agreement with them they don’t want to know you. Anything that is morally-based, they don’t want to know you. They’re not really doing us a big favour by doing that; they’re just living up to their contractual obligations.

At the same time interviewees took a sympathetic stance toward corporate staff involved in the closure. One interviewee, pointing out that managerial liaison staff residing in the community clearly must have known about the impending closure, noted that these staff members ‘had to sign confidentiality forms. They went through hell. They could not even tell their families’. Local circumvention of corporate confidentiality measures, however, was enacted in individual engagements as is evident in the following interviewee account of seeking information from company managerial staff on the day of closure:

I said, I know you guys have got confidentiality concerns, you know, you’re not allowed to tell people things that are not favourable for BHP, but I said, I guess that ‘XY and Z’. I said, I know you can’t tell … and they … they just looked at me, you know, and I said, I know you can’t say yes or no to that but you could shrug if you agree with me. [One of the mine employees] says a couple of minutes later, ‘I’m shrugging’.

Interviewees further interpreted the roles, abilities and moral orientation of mine staff as distinct from those of the corporation, which was blamed for both the fact and manner of the closure. For example, in attempting to rationalize a perceived disjuncture between the achievement of a substantial production goal on one day and the closure of the mine on the next, one interviewee reasoned:

as a workforce, as a management, as a structure, as a community-based group of people there, and I’m not using BHP because I don’t think it was BHP. They like to have their logo on everything, but this group of people, the management that was there, was working very, very, hard to get everything up and running. And if they could’ve severed their arm from BHP, well their little finger, because I think they were only even a fingernail amongst that company and kept working … [then closure would not be necessary].

Similarly, the General Manager’s absence from the closure meeting was widely understood by many interviewees as a result of corporate treachery; concurrently he emerged as a community champion. In the estimation of one interviewee, for example, the General Manager had gone ‘up to Perth to head office and fought to keep that mine open, saying it’s wrong [to close the mine this way]’.

On the other hand, interviewees involved in official dialogue with community liaison and management staff were frustrated and disadvantaged by the enforced silence about the impending closure. One interviewee described being called to the mine site and told ‘oh we’re really sorry. We’ve known about this for over a week but we had to’ [keep quiet]’. This interviewee felt betrayed by this, arguing that instead of ‘telling me everything is business as usual, they could have told me and asked me not to say anything to the media’. Subsequently, this interviewee noted, ‘I watch them and I watch their faces and I think well you’ve lied to me before why would you not be lying to me now?’ Concurrently, interviewees understand the replacement of known, locally-embedded staff with strangers as a corporate strategy for erasing knowledges gained through and of vulnerable others:

They have been very keen to remove anybody who has got any empathy for the community here [replacing them with people whose] capacity to do the job is not coloured by emotion.

The dissatisfactions and explanations offered by interviewees regarding BHP Billiton approaches to dialogue post closure are clearly shaped by BHP Billiton and broader CSR discourses. This is evident in that, of the 23 interviewees, 17 made direct reference to CSR in discussing the closure and subsequent corporate behaviour. Some questioned ‘where’s the social responsibility?’ Others commented that the corporation is ‘morally liable’, ‘socially responsible’, and ‘should be made accountable’. The only interviewee to express the opinion that the corporation was ‘genuinely trying to repair the damage’ also described its actions as ‘irresponsible’. Interviewees further articulated a clear sense that BHP Billiton was ‘turning its back’. While BHP Billiton community engagement discourse privileges stakeholders, hosts and partners, BHP Billiton was experienced by interviewees as a powerful and ultimately indifferent other. Interviewees described feeling like ‘an ant’ at risk of being ‘squashed’, and of being in a ‘David and Goliath situation’. As one interviewee expressed it, ‘even though they would come and say they consulted with us and all that sort of thing’ in reality ‘we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of really ever stopping anything BHP Billiton wanted’. Interviewees nevertheless insisted that it was important to be proactive and ‘listen very carefully and speak loudly [at CLC meetings] about how things should be done and, you know, what things we are worried about and so on’. Refusal to participate in dialogue on BHP Billiton terms was not considered to be an alternative; to refuse, it was suggested, was to have no voice at all.

The expectations of interviewees were at the same time shaped by broader hegemonic neoliberal discourses around the primacy of the free market. For example, pre-mine residents and newly-arrived mine-dependant residents alike noted of the closure that ‘it’s no-one’s fault’ and that ‘at the end of the day it’s a business’. BHP Billiton’s ‘right’ to privilege business/shareholder interests is not contested. Similarly, the issue for interviewees is not so much that BHP Billiton failed to do things for the local community or individual employees—after all the corporation was/is meeting contractual obligations, in addition had agreed to purchase homes from employees who bought houses in the area on the expectation of a lengthy residence, and had awarded money to the CLC. Rather, dissatisfaction and frustration arose from perceptions of corporate insincerity and /or corporate rejection of the partner relationship. That is, while interviewees were complicit with a broader neo-liberal ‘common-sense’ privileging of corporate interests (and ‘the economy’) over all other concerns, many at the same time saw BHP Billiton as having a (failed) responsibility to the relationship (partnership) they felt had been established between the community and the corporation. One interviewee noted:

We’re very upset because BHP Billiton has never put forward a statement to the community saying how sorry they are that the mine closed and for all the hurt that it’s caused the community.

In the estimation of several interviewees, it was the secrecy surrounding the decision to close the mine and, crucially, the attendant corporate refusal to engage with the community (partner) in pursuit of alternatives that confirmed BHP Billiton social responsibility dialogue as ‘a sham’.

Vulnerable other subjectification, agency and resistance

Interviewee discussions of the impact of closure and experiences of (attempted) dialogue with BHP Billiton/RNO indicate a pervasive local adoption of partner subject positions encoded in corporate discourse and explicitly acknowledged and encouraged by RNO. One interviewee, for example, drew attention to the local ‘psychological acceptance of the need to support the mine and the mine workers’. This subjectification was very evident in discussion around the way the decision to close the mine was made. As one interviewee phrased it, a ‘hugely commented thing in the town by absolutely everybody is that why the hell didn’t they [BHP Billiton/RNO] try something’ before closing the mine. That this became an important topic, and one discussed in a range of everyday local spaces including the queue at the supermarket, homes and hotel bars suggests that the adoption of the concept of partnership and attendant subject position was widespread and ‘freely’ undertaken. This adoption, and complicity with the corporate view of the relationship between business and society, is exemplified in the plethora of local solutions for avoiding closure many of which went against individual interests as in suggested reduced working hours and partial ramp-down of the mine.

Similarly, interviewees offered solutions to the problem of 300 soon-to-be-empty BHP Billiton-owned houses in the area. The future occupancy of these houses was an obvious concern for the local community and it is not surprising to see attempts to be proactive in shaping future outcomes. However, community members sought to do so by adopting the role of corporate partner and attempting to find win-win outcomes. One solution tendered by the Ravensthorpe Chamber of Commerce, for example, involved redeploying mine staff to other BHP Billiton projects and flying these workers in and out of the new (otherwise soon to be closed) local airport while their families continued to live locally in BHP Billiton housing. This was proudly offered as achieving ‘wins’ for individual workers who wanted to stay in Hopetoun, for the local community which thus might keep the airport and for BHP Billiton which would continue to benefit from its investment in this housing stock. This suggestion, it seems, was poorly received by BHP Billiton and was certainly not officially acknowledged. One interviewee recounted an anecdote concerning how a document attempting to determine the level of interest in this proposal went ‘out on the RNO all-users mailing system about 15 minutes before a managers’ meeting’. At this point,

the shit hit the fan, it absolutely hit the fan. People were waving their arms around and yelling and swearing and carrying on: ‘what is this email going out to all users? We [RNO] do not want this email going out to all our members here’.

In the interviewee’s opinion, ‘obviously BHP is not in favour of fly-in, fly-out using Hopetoun as a base, and they didn’t want this flyer going out and attracting any attention’.

The grounds on which post-closure dialogue with the corporation was sought also explicitly enacted partner subject positions. One interviewee reasoned that ‘whole of community’ dialogue was of benefit to the company because the company was making ‘policy on the run’ and ‘the best way to make good decisions is broad consultation’. In particular,

This is the time they need to say, okay, let’s sit down and see if we can work this through and engage in a process. I don’t expect BHP to bounce out of the blocks tomorrow and say, here’s the package that’s going to fix everybody’s problems. I don’t expect that at all. What I would like to see BHP do is sit down and work the process with the community in a way that shows that they are prepared to look after their interests but also generally engage with the problem.

As a result, this interviewee argued, BHP Billiton would be able to ‘hold their [sic] head up internationally’. Vulnerable other responses thus frame dialogue as ‘engaging with the problem’ in search of win/win solutions and reproduce business-centric corporate social responsibility discourse. Indeed, corporate engagement is promoted by vulnerable others even though the corporation is expected to look after its own interests. Engaging in a process (to find mutually beneficial ways to avoid closure, and then to minimize local impact) is what matters.

Adoption of this partner subject position (and reproduction of the constituting discourse) is not only to be acted upon but is also to act, and in ways which may modify the originary discourse. There is for example a degree of agency and subversion in the vulnerable other identification of win-win solutions: according to BHP Billiton discourse the corporation determines the grounds for win-win situations/relationships—not the vulnerable other. The opportunity for vulnerable other agency opened up in local adoptions of a proactive partner subject position is rendered impotent by the corporation’s rejection of this relationship. BHP Billiton is not only discursively empowered as sole initiator of (voluntary) dialogue, it is also in a position to refuse overtures made by vulnerable others, and does so when the negative effects of corporate decisions (clearly made in the interest of strong profit generation for shareholders) were intensely experienced. Importantly, this refusal had substantial material effects in terms of aggravating or compounding the debilitating stress and uncertainty attending the personal and community impacts of the corporation’s secret decision-making processes and abrupt, almost preemptive, closure of the mine.

Contribution to understandings of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others

This case study has tracked the ways in which BHP Billiton CSR discourse and practice around dialogue with vulnerable others systemically privileges business-centred goals and, more importantly, defines the subject positions and relationships within and through which dialogue can/should (normatively) occur. The displacement of corporate ignorance with local knowledge even at times of intense local vulnerability and a local history of corporate community engagement and proximity has been shown to be far from simple. For example, precisely when vulnerability was particularly pronounced, knowledge of and connections to the local community and/or specific vulnerable others was actively erased by removing staff likely to have this knowledge. At the same time vulnerable others differentiated between local corporate staff and the corporation, which remains in the view/experience of its ‘engaged’ vulnerable others an abstract and ignorant entity. More importantly, the objects and subject positions produced in and through corporate discourse and practice militate against vulnerable others apprising BHP Billiton/RNO of the ‘actual myriad effects’ of its business. Instead, external others affected by the company’s operations are tasked with working together with the company to achieve better corporate outcomes/futures, and are simultaneously positioned as complicit with, if not well-served by, business-centric CSR discourse and practice. Concurrently, these subject positions and ‘partner’ relations enact a disciplinary power through which vulnerable other time, labour, creativity and knowledge are appropriated.

Crucially, corporate dialogue with vulnerable others substantively erases ‘vulnerable other’ subject positions through corporate constructions of the communities affected by the company’s operations as hosts, mutual beneficiaries and, most effectively, partners. The analysis offered here thus lends empirical support to critiques of stakeholder dialogue as inherently limiting the interests of marginalized groups and constraining vulnerable other behaviour. Further, the case study challenges the notion that voluntary corporate vulnerable other dialogue (as constructed by corporations) is the key to making CSR possible. Erasure of vulnerable other subject positions is also the erasure of positions or spaces from which to not only articulate the myriad effects of corporate actions but also develop critiques of and alternatives to contemporary business-society relations. Indeed, dialogue with vulnerable others as manifest in Ravensthorpe it can be argued is thereby counter to making CSR possible.

Significantly, vulnerable other criticism did not address the corporation’s privileging of shareholders and profit-making. Rather, criticism centred on the corporation’s failure to honour the partner relationship constructed in corporate discourse as at the heart of BHP Billiton CSR. The local dissatisfaction with BHP Billiton’s strategy of concentrating exclusively on contractual obligations encodes a degree of corporate discursive capture. For interviewed vulnerable others, CSR lies in accepting whole-of-community and also individual calls for dialogue. Vulnerable other interviewees saw corporate engagement, the professed responsibility to work with local communities, as core socially responsible behaviour. Just as the absence of ‘effective community engagement strategies’ is posited in corporate discourse as resulting in business delays and costs, the absence of dialogue post closure in Ravensthorpe had damaging material consequences for vulnerable others. In this instance, dialogue with vulnerable others is not just a failed means to achieving CSR, it is social responsibility. The inability of marginalized stakeholders to engage with corporations is not unique to this case (see Banerjee, 2007). However, this case study demonstrates that despite adopting concepts and subject positions encoded in BHP Billiton/CSR discourse, vulnerable others were unable to either apprise the corporation of its effects, or to ‘work together’ to minimize the impact of closure. This case study thus questions the value to vulnerable others of engaging with the corporation, while raising the issue of losses in terms of what interviewees described as ‘wasted time and effort’ but also in terms of loss of critical distance from the corporation.

The concepts, objects and subject positions mobilized in the engagement of/with vulnerable others in Ravensthorpe exemplify industry-wide discourse and increasingly normative and routine global corporate practice. The community engagement made possible in Ravensthorpe is not merely a product of local conditions, or communication styles, or discourses peculiar to RNO/BHP Billiton. Community engagement in Ravensthorpe occurs within, and at the same time legitimates, a neoliberal emphasis on partnerships between businesses and local communities as the way of the future in addressing social issues, and pressures on transnational corporations to become a ‘positive force’ by contributing to ‘social development goals’ (Warhurst, 2005: 153). The conclusions drawn here have broad general application not least in terms of calls for ‘new frameworks for organization-stakeholder dialogue’ (Banerjee, 2008: 73). While Roberts (2003) has underestimated the complexity and fraught nature of corporate engagement with vulnerable others not least in relation to discursive appropriation and power asymmetries, he was right to conceive of this dialogue as something other than stakeholder engagement. This case study suggests in addition that corporate-vulnerable other dialogue if it is to have any chance of making CSR work for society must occur in frameworks that actively de-centre the corporation and minimize if not reject the validity and primacy of win-win outcomes. The right to initiate and refuse corporate-vulnerable other dialogue, to decide who should and can participate and in what ways, cannot rest with corporations. Critically, corporate discourse around what constitutes dialogue and appropriate objects and subject positions must at the same time be de-centred/resisted. In short, a radical shift is required in which corporate socially responsible participation in dialogue with vulnerable others would be compulsory, externally accountable, and subject to external enforcement. However, this too may be chimerical given what may well be a socially advanced and wide-spread vulnerable other subjection to hegemonic, win-win, (neo-liberal) business partnership discourse such as occurred in Ravensthorpe.