Abstract
In The End of Corporate Social Responsibility, Fleming and Jones offer a sustained and direct assault upon the political, theoretical and ideological underpinnings of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), both as a field of academic research and as an empirically observable corporate practice. Their line of critique is grounded in the observation that CSR systematically overlooks the structural anti-sociality of capitalism as a system of social and economic production. Only through a willful blindness to this political economic reality of capitalism can the idea of CSR be sustained. Once this reality is recognized, it is clear that the capitalist corporation is materially and culturally dominated by a single hegemonic rationality, or institutional logic: the economic rationality of profit maximization. This logic is not only one amongst many, culturally embedded logics (cf. Thornton et al., 2012). It is the foundational logic of the capitalist corporation. As such, CSR is inevitably subordinated to this economic-instrumental logic of profit maximization and functions as an externalizing machine, unloading costs onto the state, society and the environment. As such, it is constitutionally anti-social and CSR is an oxymoron serving the ideological function of concealing the corporation’s true nature and perpetuating the dangerous fantasy that corporate social responsibility is a coherent and realistic proposition. In making this argument, Fleming and Jones work through the basic founding conceptions of CSR (chapter 1), the Corporate Citizenship literature (chapter 2), Stakeholder Theory (chapter 3) and HRM/Employee Branding (chapter 4) before deepening their critique to in chapter 5 to examine the ways in which CSR is a key part in the extension of capitalist relations, rather than a force that mitigates the destructiveness of these relations.
The Introduction outlines the main drivers of CSR and outlines the structure of the book and its main arguments. Chapter 1 develops the main arguments concerning the dominance of economic rationality and draws up a matrix – the Business Activity Impact Matrix – to locate different models of the business/society relationship. Here the authors suggest that the most common relationship is in the area labelled ‘corporate social irresponsibility’, where there is a positive outcome for the organization and a negative impact on society. To understand why this is the case, Fleming and Jones not only outline the basic contradiction between social responsibility and capitalism, but ground this in a discussion of recent empirical changes and challenges in the capitalist political economy. Using the rather awkward term ‘gigatrends’ (drawing on John Naisbitt’s futurological idea of ‘megatrends’ from the 1980s), the chapter outlines five key features of contemporary capitalist development: climate change, peak oil, the rise of the BRIC nations, genomics and the commodification of life itself and the systemic production of ‘surplus humanity’, particularly in the megacities of the global south. Against this empirical background, the idea that business can continue ‘as usual’ is a willful fantasy as the world is clearly in the midst of a slow, drawn out, catabolic apocalypse. CSR is incapable of preventing, or even slowing, this process as it fails to address the underlying processes that produce them, plastering them over with a veneer of ethicality.
This is where Fleming and Jones move their analysis beyond the quite obvious – at least from the radical structuralist paradigm they are working in – point that CSR is an oxymoron. Rather than dismissing CSR as a bad joke, or simply revealing that the emperor has no clothes, they offer a second line of critique which analyses the ideological functioning of CSR. By perpetuating the fantasy that capitalist corporations could be ethically, environmentally and socially responsible, CSR contributes to the denial of the real nature of capitalism and the perpetuation of its destructive practices. In this sense, CSR is a part of what Mark Fisher (2009) has called ‘capitalist realism’: the idea that there is no alternative and that capitalism, however bad, is the only possible model for economic organization. This not only dismisses non-capitalist alternatives as unrealistic (Gibson-Graham, 2006) but also blinds analyses, like those offered in the mainstream CSR literature, to the ground of capitalist political-economic relations upon which the corporation is based.
These twin lines of critique are developed through chapters 2 to 4 of the book. Chapter 2 addresses the idea of ‘corporate citizenship’ and particularly the ‘new corporate citizenship’ of Matten and Crane (2005), which extends the well established idea of the corporation as a citizen to examine whether, in light of the apparent withdrawal of the state from the administration of its citizens, the corporation might be able to take over this role. Assuming that ‘free markets’ are the most moral and efficient way of delivering all goods (and despite a mass of evidence to the contrary) modern neo-liberal states have handed over the provision of essential services such as welfare, health and education to private providers. Fleming and Jones take issue with the idea that corporations can deliver citizenship rights and that even if they did, it would be unreliable and lack democratic accountability. Instead of the corporation becoming an ethical guarantor of citizenship and rights, this process commodifies citizenship and subordinates human rights to property rights and consumption.
Chapter 3 extends this analysis to consider the limits of ‘stakeholder theory’, suggesting that the idea of corporations engaging in democratic debate with the full range of its stakeholders is a fantasy, so long as corporations are structured around the root logic of profit maximization and accumulation. In such circumstances, the idea of stakeholder democracy is reduced to public relations and the containment of dissent. Instead, the authors suggest, we need a ‘Critical Stakeholder Analysis’ (CSA) that does not start from the pluralist idea that all stakeholders are equal, but attends to the obdurate inequalities between social actors, of which the corporation is often the most powerful and dominant. This kind of CSA would look quite similar to David Levy’s Global Production Networks (GPN) analysis (Levy, 2008), attending to, rather than concealing, basic structural inequalities and power relations.
Chapter 4 moves inside the corporation to consider the HRM and people management aspects of CSR. The main focus is on how the ideals and desires of ‘Generation Y’ employees are addressed by CSR in order to ensure their continued engagement. Many employees are cynical about corporate life, or even work itself, and reject the basic values of profit for its own sake and limitless accumulation. Rather, they are searching for a meaningful relationship between their personal values and working lives: a sense of worth and integrity in work. In this context ‘CSR might be seen as a human resource tool designed to align an otherwise apprehensive and conscientious workforce with an unsustainable corporate world’ (p. 71). Following the established line of critique, the authors ask what is left out of the CSR discourse. In this case, it is the simple question of why workers feel so bad about work in the first place that they need this kind of employer branding and culture management to reconcile themselves with their employment. In is HRM guise, then, CSR is a sticking plaster to cover over fundamental contradictions in capitalist work and employment.
Chapter 5 moves away from examining the elements of CSR to examine the political economic functioning of CSR. Here Fleming and Jones’ work is the most challenging but also least developed, claiming that: … CSR might be seen not only as a useless piece of ideology that is designed to hide the inconvenient truth, but as something even more sinister: a predatory extension of corporate power under the crisis condition of late capitalism. (p. 89)
Drawing on previous work with Hanlon (Hanlon, 2007; Hanlon and Fleming, 2009), the argument being made here is that CSR should not just be dismissed as ideological obfuscation and propaganda. Rather, it functions to legitimate an extension of the corporate logic of capitalist accumulation. The context of CSR, especially in the ‘corporate citizenship’ variant discussed in chapter 2 of the book, is one of neo-liberal globalization in which the state is depicted as being in retreat and progressively withdrawing from the provision of social goods such as welfare, health and education. While the state remains strong in defending property rights and the economy, this withdrawal from the provision of social goods has opened up a new space for commodification. Indeed, in light of the post-2008 austerity politics of most Western governments, it would seem that the crisis prone nature of capitalism has rendered the state ever less willing to provide essential social goods, and thus even more dependent upon privatization and corporate delivery of essential services. For such private provision to be politically acceptable, however, corporations have to be seen as at basically responsible social actors. This is where CSR comes in. By systematically neglecting the structural contradictions of capitalism, CSR depicts even the most egregious and regular cases of malpractice as exceptions: the result of a few bad apples or lessons not fully learned. The idea of the basic ‘goodness’ of the corporation is thus protected, even if actually socially responsible behaviour is infinitely deferred to a future state when democratic accountability and ecological sustainability will be finally realized (with just a bit more backsliding in the meantime …). This has the effect of legitimating the capitalist corporation as capable of providing goods in areas such as healthcare, education and welfare, opening up these markets to speculation and accumulation, thereby enabling capital ‘to commodify its own crisis’ (p. 90).
This point is elaborated in chapter 5 of the book, suggesting that we should not see CSR as a ‘positive’, however sympathetic we might be to its professed ideals, nor as a case of simple ‘propaganda’, but rather as a predatory ‘parasite’, legitimizing and extending the sphere of corporate influence. Although a few examples are given here, they are not well elaborated. The cynical use of Fair Trade branding by Nestlé to establish its ethical credentials, despite maintaining highly exploitative relationships with suppliers (Levy, 2008), not only functions as ethical ‘propaganda’, but also allows Nestlé to extend its influence into the sphere of ethical consumption (p. 92). Social entrepreneurship and the leveraging of socially located ‘free labour’ in Facebook and Google are also given here as examples of how CSR is part and parcel of a commodification of social relations, but these are not well developed either empirically or theoretically, despite there being a significant, critical academic literature on social entrepreneurship as well as the political economy of the new media (Fuchs, 2010). Ultimately, then, the chapter raises more questions than it answers, suggesting but not elaborating a new line of research into CSR for critical academics.
There are a number of areas where a similar criticism can be made of this book. Despite its wide ranging purview, the book is just 107 pages long. This limits the details given in empirical examples but also restricts the theoretical developments in the book. For example, although the language of institutional logics is used throughout the book, there is no real engagement with this theoretical perspective (see Thornton et al., 2012), which sits at odds with the very structural approach adopted here. A more robust development of the relationship between the economic logic of the corporation and other logics, and between the material and cultural aspects of these institutional logics, would have opened up a much needed line of critique on contemporary institutional theories, as well as CSR. Both share an underlying weakness when accounting for power and structure, for example.
Such a theoretical development would also have allowed a more nuanced account of the conditions under which the reigning economic logic might be challenged. As it stands there is little in the way of positive alternatives to CSR offered in this book. Indeed, whilst Fleming and Jones call for an end to CSR, in that any realization of the ideals of CSR would necessarily be non-corporate and require radical social change and revolution, there is little sense of how this might actually be achieved. They present the capitalist corporation as structured by an indomitable and unitary logic of economic performativity, leaving no real conceptual space for social change. This seriously weakens their answers to the question ‘what is to be done?’ (p. 99), which move between very abstract suggestions that decisionmakers need to change their ‘cognitive maps’ and demands that academics stop studying CSR. The former sounds very much like the kinds of CSR that they have spent the entire book arguing is impossible. The latter fails to appreciate the depth of corporatization in academic institutions and careers. Indeed, as long as there is money in it and it is publishable, it is hard to imagine the CSR discourse actually ending.
Which brings us to my final comment. Toward the end of the book (p. 98), the authors give the example of the Danish engineering firm Danfoss, which was well known for its CSR credentials, but recently stopped using the language at all. Perhaps in an era of recession, financial instability, high-unemployment and fiscal austerity, we are facing a different set of institutional pressures than those that gave rise to the CSR discourse. The catabolic crisis that Fleming and Jones point to in chapter 1 has, if anything, deepened in recent years (the Fukushima disaster makes the BP Deep Water Horizon oil leaks look like a minor mishap) but the appeal of CSR seems to have diminished. In this sense, the book is perhaps really a recognition that CSR has already ended, but not with the advent of a non-corporate social responsibility, as the authors hope is yet possible, but with a retrenchment of corporate social irresponsibility. Indeed, students reading this would probably agree with most of what is said, but like those following Milton Friedman’s not entirely dissimilar analysis, would simply accept that this is the reality they face and dispense with the ideological masking. And in the current context, with corporate power growing and the world more and more resembling that depicted by Margaret Atwood in After the Flood, and Oryx and Crake, perhaps there is no need for corporations to appear responsible in order to extend their control. To challenge this, we need a stronger theory of the corporation and a more active development of strategies of resistance and the constitution of non-capitalist alternatives.