Abstract
In Good Company promises to provide an ethnographic account of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR has elevated Transnational Corporations (TNCs) to the status of vehicles for social and moral improvement. The global reach and efficient methods employed by these ‘corporations with a human face’ (p. 9) provide the potential answers to a limitless range of global concerns with the profit nevertheless continuing to hold sway. To examine this ‘(…) happy confluence of economic value and ethical values packaged together in the new human (or humane) face of capitalism’ (p. 2), the ‘moral economy’ of CSR needs to be studied as a practice. Rajak provides an ethnography of the CSR programs of a major ore-extracting company, Anglo American, in London, Johannesburg and Rustenburg, a South African mining community.
CSR, Rajak argues, provides the rationale, the language and the means to make people commit to market logics as the point of departure for societal change. This becomes clear in the education programs offered by Anglo American for excellent students. Although bursaries are presented with emotionally charged language of warmth and common bond, these ‘gifts’ do not come freely. Recipients are constantly reminded of its provenance and the best students are expected to enroll into the ranks of the company that dispensed the bursary. Officers in charge of the program constantly shift between the language of ‘giving’ and the language of ‘investment’ from which the company ‘expects returns’. This means that the recipients find themselves in a position of ‘moral debt’ in which they need to demonstrate gratitude and deference. Throughout, the dynamics of benefactor and beneficiary prevail.
These dynamics are strengthened by the fact that gift relations cannot be enforced. As one manager of an NGO states: ‘There’s no way you can take them to court. You can’t make the company comply to your contractual obligations’ (p. 195). Three reasons can be gleaned from the book for this lack of ability to enforce. The first is that the notion of ‘partnerships’ implies an equality of the corporate citizen to the NGO as a ‘moral’ agent. This dispenses with the need for state regulation (p. 42). Secondly, contractual relations are couched in a narrative of the recipient as a successful ‘social entrepreneur’. In this narrative, ‘empowerment’ means that recipients become morally responsible to seize the opportunities that ‘the market’ offers. This helps the company ‘(…) to expand, contract, cut costs and off-load responsibility, according to their needs, or will’ (p. 199). Finally, a permanent invocation of economic uncertainty and crisis is used to legitimate the absence of commitment on the part of the corporation as a donor, turning NGOs into dependent henchmen. The ‘citizenship’ of the corporation therefore comes without accountability and enforceable social obligations: ‘The company, while being “responsible” is under obligation to none of the recipients of its empowerment initiatives—the great benefit of gift relations’ (p. 198).
The ‘moral economy’ that CSR projects thus strengthens the moral authority of corporations and the market, co-opts support, and allows the ‘corporate citizen’ to tap into a wealth of moral resources, including social expertise and political agency. At the same time, it disguises cold market logics and produces an extensive set of non-negotiables, including the primacy of shareholder value, structural dimensions of the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources and the implicit power differences and paternalistic relations that underlie notions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘partnership’. Under these conditions CSR functions as a source of immense moral and political power, which serves ‘(…) to empower the corporation rather than the supposed subjects of their empowerment initiatives’ (p. 213).
Rajak’s critique of CSR is interesting, valid and timely. Moreover, the attempt to connect the global nature of CSR discourse to local practices is laudable. However, as Rajak states in the introduction, in an ethnograpic account the ‘how’ of governance practices is the important factor. She starts by giving a beautiful example in which representatives of a community are hushed off the stage when they try to speak out uninvited at a CSR conference to contest the presented effects of a company’s CSR policy. This convincingly shows the wedding of CSR with global capitalism as it is enacted in expensive hotels and conference centres. After this example, however, the reader arrives at the mines in Rustenburg only in the very last chapters of the book. As a result, the reader confronts critical claims about the performativity of CSR throughout the book without having seen this performativity at work. Moreover, because the ethnographic content keeps being pushed to the back, the analysis and critique are too often based on CSR as a hegemonic global discourse, rather than on the dynamics specific to the various levels of the ethnography.
In conclusion, the book succeeds in showing how the concept of the ‘moral economy’ is ‘bound up with the survival, the reproduction and adaptation of corporate hegemony’ (p. 88). However, for an ethnographic account with the stated aim of re-embedding CSR as a global discourse in local practices, too much of a premium is placed upon the development of a critical outlook on CSR as a global hegemonic discourse. Starting with the voices, concerns and problems of the excluded and marginalized ‘objects’ of CSR may have allowed the reader to find more of the concerns particular to those in Rustenburg, and less to those in London.