The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility: Techniques of Neutralization, Stakeholder Management and Political CSR

Abstract

Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively under-developed. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning business activity with the broader public interest. This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR.

Seeking Legitimacy Through CSR: Institutional Pressures and Corporate Responses of Multinationals in Sri Lanka

“…The manipulation strategy also bears a close resemblance to Fooks et al's (2013) (Polishchuk, 2009;Vallentin and Murillo, 2012).…”

“…Therefore, in effect, companies are not implementing community initiatives simply for ethical or philanthropic reasons but for more instrumental reasons such as long-term profit maximisation (Navarro, 1988) through the creation of competitive and comparative advantages for the firm (Hillman and Keim, 2001;Porter and Kramer, 2002;Waddock and Boyle, 1995) and in order to gain socio-political legitimacy (Hemphill, 1999) from powerful institutional stakeholders. Although previous studies have examined the potential instrumental benefits of corporate community initiatives (Fooks et al, 2013;Saiia et al, 2003), very few studies (but see Zhao, 2012) investigate how companies exploit these initiatives to seek legitimacy from the state and other key institutional actors. Some studies, such as the one conducted by Su and He (2010), have shown that firms engage in philanthropy to maximise the firm's benefits, not in the form of an immediate economic return, but rather in order to maximise their 'political return', which is designed to circumvent regulation or seek to be better protected from government intervention or legislation.…”

“…The implementation of CSR by subsidiaries has also been recognised by some authors (See Fooks et al, 2013;Lawrence, 2010;Miller, 2008) as the deliberate use of managerial agency to gain legitimisation. Empirical studies have furnished substantial evidence to indicate that companies use CSR instrumentally to achieve a range of objectives including the desire to generate new business opportunities (Hahn, 2009), to project an image of positive social performance (Fombrun and Shanley, 1990), to mitigate or off-set poor social performance in other areas (Chen et al, 2010), to protect companies from negative forms of regulation and/or help them meet stakeholder expectations, which ultimately can result in financial gains for companies in either the short-or long-term (Polishchuk, 2009).…”

“…Rather, we argue that multinational firms are capable of taking proactive measures, so as to engage in a dynamic way with these institutional pressures and pursue effective legitimacy-seeking strategies. We recognise that the firms could employ a range of different types or kinds of CSR initiatives with the objective of building longterm relationships with the state and other important institutional actors, so that ultimately their survival in the country can be assured (Fooks et al, 2013).…”

It’s common sense, stupid! Corporate crime and techniques of neutralization in the automobile industry

“…Indeed, a small body of research emerged in the 1980s to develop the concept of techniques of neutralization to corporate wrongdoing: the illegitimate activities that corporation engages in [12,13,14]. More recently there has been a resurgence of research that has applied this basic approach to corporate wrongdoing ( [15,16,17]; and [18]). This work uses precisely the same framework set out by Sykes and Matza and followed by Cohen (though remarkably, Cohen refers to none of this work on corporate denial in his work on state denial; 1993 and 2001).…”