Rendre compte du social. L’art du compromis performatif

How is social accounting produced and how accountable are corporations for their social responsibility ? This paper develops a performative compromise framework for studying how theories and ideologies, the actors who create or mobilize them, and their instrumentation, interact together to produce a form of social accountability. To evaluate our framework, we compare two moments during which the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been translated in the French law : the 1977 Law on Bilan social (social balance sheet), and the 2001 Law on Nouvelles regulations économiques (new economic regulations).