The Moral Relationality of Professionalism Discourses: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Practitioners in South Korea

Abstract

Building a coherent discourse on professionalism is a challenge for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as there is not yet an established knowledge basis for CSR, and CSR is a contested notion that covers a wide variety of issues and moral foundations. Relying on insights from the literature on micro-CSR, new professionalism, and Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991/2006) economies of worth framework, we examine the discourses of 56 CSR practitioners in South Korea on their claimed professionalism. Our analysis delineates four distinct discourses of CSR professionalism— strategic corporate giving, social innovation, risk management, and sustainability transition—that are derived from a plurality of more or less compatible moral foundations whose partial overlaps and tensions we document in a systematic manner. Our results portray these practitioners as compromise makers who selectively combine morally distant justifications to build their own specific professionalism discourse, with the aim to advance CSR within and across organizations. By uncovering the moral relationality connecting these discourses, our findings show that moral pluralism is a double-edged sword that can not only bolster the justification of CSR professionalism but also threaten collective professionalism at the field level. Overall, our study suggests paying more attention to the moral relationality and tensions that underlie professional fields.

Tensions in the strategic integration of corporate sustainability through global standards: Evidence from Japan and South Korea

“…Despite the importance of managing tensions to successfully integrate CS into business strategy (Hahn et al, 2015;Siltaloppi et al, 2020), there is little knowledge of the tensions of CS managers from implementing global standards in MNCs. Apart from few exceptions (Fontana, 2020;Shin, Cho, et al, 2021), this is particularly the case outside Western and especially North American contexts (Epstein et al, 2015;Gao & Bansal, 2013). Hence, this article echoes calls to deepen understanding of the tensions associated with CS at the level of the implementers (Hahn et al, 2010;Hahn et al, 2015) by posing the following questions:…”

“…Both in Japanese (Eweje & Sasaki, 2015) and Korean MNCs (Park et al, 2015), CS managers are key because they are tasked with the implementation of such standards. As covered in the following sub‐sections, much evidence on CS in these contexts draws on national and macro analyses but often excludes the level of the implementers (Fontana, 2020; Shin, Cho, et al, 2021; Shin, Vu, et al, 2021).…”

“…Despite the importance of managing tensions to successfully integrate CS into business strategy (Hahn et al, 2015; Siltaloppi et al, 2020), there is little knowledge of the tensions of CS managers from implementing global standards in MNCs. Apart from few exceptions (Fontana, 2020; Shin, Cho, et al, 2021), this is particularly the case outside Western and especially North American contexts (Epstein et al, 2015; Gao & Bansal, 2013). Hence, this article echoes calls to deepen understanding of the tensions associated with CS at the level of the implementers (Hahn et al, 2010; Hahn et al, 2015) by posing the following questions: What, if any, are the tensions experienced by CS managers in Japanese and Korean MNCs when implementing global standards associated with CS? How do CS managers in Japanese and Korean MNCs react to such tensions? In response to these questions, this study theoretically combines the literature on CS and tensions and the contextual literature on CS in Japan and Korea.…”

Overcoming unintended consequences of social impact accountability: How to avoid counterproductive responses of individuals and groups in organizations

“…First, because abilities and intentions to improve social impact are not necessarily aligned. For instance, CSR practitioners indicate that they struggle to explain how the organization's everyday practices connect to morally distant justifications (Ghadiri et al., 2015; Shin et al., 2021). This easily leads them to exaggerate their activities in support of stakeholder outcomes and social causes to detract attention from the environmental and social costs of core activities of the organization (Alves, 2009; Torelli et al., 2012).…”

How corporate social responsibility and sustainable development functions impact the workplace

“…2019*). For example, in the context of South Korea,Shin et al (2021*) delineate four distinct and competing discourses of CSR professionalism held by CSR/SD practitioners that contribute both to legitimizing, and to fragmenting and undermining, the development of this institutional field. Furthermore, a recent dialogue between scholars from the CSR/SD field and scholars from the sociology of professions highlighted a number of peculiar features of CSR/SD professions, such as the lack of a clear knowledge base, relatively vague boundaries and recurrent questioning of the social and ecological impact of such work.…”