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

作者：Gary Fooks, Anna Gilmore, Jeff Collin, Chris Holden, Kelley Lee · 发表于：Journal of Business Ethics · 年份：2012 · DOI：10.1007/s10551-012-1250-5 · 被引用次数：296 · 研究领域：Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting、Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology、Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering

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 under...