Engineering corporate social responsibility: elite stakeholders, states and the resilience of neoliberalism

CSR-Washing is Rare: A Conceptual Framework, Literature Review, and Critique

“…These scholars tend to severely downplay the normative pressures and institutional channels by which CSR practices and CSR understandings have emerged, diffused, and entrenched in recent decades so as to become taken for granted aspects of the modern company's identity and organizational structure (Brammer et al 2012;Delmas and Toffel 2004;Lim and Tsutsui 2012;Meyer et al 2012;Shanahan and Khagram 2006). Rather, these scholars tend to separate companies from the societies in which they are embedded and to view their relationships to these societies as hinging on power and reward contests with regulators, consumers, and social movements (Hanlon 2011;Kinderman 2011;Shamir 2004). That is, CSR-washing accusations portray companies as closed, agentic, and instrumentally sociopathic (Bakan 2004;Scott 2002).…”

Energy Policy and Environmental Possibilities: Biofuels and Key Protagonists of Ecological Change*

“…Moreover, as attention to deforestation and other ecological problems with biofuels in places like Indonesia has increased, biofuel producers have moved and expanded production to Africa to meet growing world demand (Allen 2010). Given these realities, and the long and well‐researched history of “engineering corporate social responsibility,” there is no room for innocence regarding the extent to which it is possible for public relations to be more important than fundamental changes in practices of private market actors, making research on the actual behaviors of actors (such as the details of the policies they promote) all the more important (Hanlon 2011). Moreover, the social equity implications of the loss of representative decision making to market authority mean that “a range of currently debated and applied economic policy tools to mitigate climate change are likely to have regressive effects, meaning that households in lower income brackets bear a (considerably) higher burden of the cost as a percentage of their income than those in higher brackets” (Büchs, Bardsley, and Duwe 2011:286).…”

Neoliberalism, crises and accusations of fraud: a vicious circle of reinforcing influences?

“…Consistent with the view of neoliberalism as a pervasive political project whose aim is to reduce the ascendancy of collective structures, researchers seeking to explain its robustness generally put forward three main kinds of arguments. Many bring to the fore the crucial role played by the agency of those who dominate the regime (Crouch, 2011;Duménil and Lévy, 2000;Hanlon, 2011;Harvey, 2005;Merino et al, 2010;Peck, 2004Peck, , 2010Plehwe et al, 2006;Stein, 2008). Others argue that neoliberal governmentality, because it operates through a web of diffused powers and rationales, makes it difficult for local protagonists to avoid and subvert its pervasive influence (Gledhill, 2005;Hardt and Negri, 2000;Jessop, 2002;Peck and Tickell, 2002).…”

“…Our paper complements the literature about neoliberalism in stressing the role played by collective and spontaneous processes of scapegoating (which are processes of sensemaking) in the robustness of this mode of governance. Many researchers seeking to explain neoliberalism's robustness bring to the fore the crucial role played by the agency of those who dominate the regime in the preservation of the status quo despite significant crises (Crouch, 2011;Duménil and Lévy, 2000;Hanlon, 2011;Harvey, 2005;Merino et al, 2010;Peck, 2004Peck, , 2010Plehwe et al, 2006;Stein, 2008). Admittedly, sensemaking is not a disinterested process, but a process loaded with issues of power…”