Corporate Social Responsibility : Preserving Neoliberal Capitalism or Prefiguring Alternatives?

My argument in this paper has two parts. The first is that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) emerged as a one of global business’ preferred strategies for quelling popular discontent with corporate power. But the second part of my argument is that CSR has taken on a life of its own and represents an enabling shift in how business is being understood. Primarily I argue that CSR discourse has accelerated the development of alternative business forms that prioritize sustainability and social justice more than maximizing profit (i.e. social business and the larger social economy). While I think CSR discourse developed to quiet public concern with corporate power, it is not clear where it will end up. The political world is a complex place where good intentions can result in bad outcomes and bad intentions can result in good outcomes. As Max Weber argued in his essay ˜Politics as a Vocation" it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is a political infantâ€? (1969, p. 123). Perhaps the lip-service corporations are paying to sustainability means more effective regulation will continue being forestalled in the short term. But it is also possible that CSR discourse has helped spark an economic transformation that prefigures alternatives to neoliberal capitalism--something the original proponents of corporate social responsibility might not have counted on