Editorial 28.6: Corporate social irresponsibility
Dr Martina Topić-Rutherford2023, Corporate Communications: An International Journal
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Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a buzzword in academic debates in the past few decades due to many scholarly studies tackling this issue (Levashova, 2014). The debate originally centred on the dichotomy of the stakeholder vs shareholder approach where the stakeholder approach, mainly associated with Freeman and his circle, argued that corporations need to go beyond satisfying just shareholders whilst the shareholder approach, mainly associated with Freedman, advocated that corporations need to only satisfy shareholders because this is their role and what corporations do (Freeman, 2010; Friedman, 1962). There are, however, works that called CSR policies as mirroring the zeitgeist arguing that corporations only have CSR policies for reputational reasons and that CSR is just greenwashing. The view on CSR largely depends on political views of authors so neoliberal views will see CSR as an attempt to impose public social preferences on private property (Krugman, 2007; Sheehy, 2014); centrist-left agenda sees CSR as an opportunity to deliver a more equal and just society with NGOs being the main promotors of this agenda (Sheehy, 2014) whilst the far-left agenda equates CSR to neoliberalism and as a smokescreen that prevents and limits societal changes (Fleming and Jones, 2013; Ireland and Pillay, 2009; Sheehy, 2014). In a study we conducted on food, soft drinks and packaging industries in the UK, it appeared that the food industry was most active in its CSR programme but this was largely linked to consumer and media activism whilst the packaging industry works under the guidance of the supermarkets where CSR managers admitted that this is influenced by consumers with a reference, also often being made on an influential BBC programme Blue Planet, thus prompting us to ask whether CSR is just another mirroring the zeitgeist policy where organisations do what it suits their reputation at each point in time (Topi c et al., 2021). In addition to that, I also argued that CSR is a smokescreen for capitalism and keeping the status quo intact by designing a wheel of neoliberalism where I labelled CSR as one of the cogs in the wheel along with environmental governance and technology, liberal media, degradation of the environment, patriarchy, capitalism and policies of the economic growth (Topi c, 2021). However, one research area of CSR that some researchers started to investigate is corporate social irresponsibility (CSI), which is interesting because this area can be used by authors from all political sides of the CSR spectrum to measure the irresponsibility of companies within their distinctive positions. Existing research argued that assessing companies on the CSR-CSI dichotomy would help in overcoming problems with CSR and its understanding because "CSI is a term better suited to describing the workings of the "old" shareholder business model (.. .) and that CSR is more applicable to the workings of the new and emerging stakeholder business model" (Jones et al., 2009, p. 301). This model, thus, looks at scrutinising organisations based on their performance in all fields, thus not making it look as if organisations are generally irresponsible and not committed to CSR but scoring them, which opens an opportunity to recognise that some organisations have good policies in one field but not the other, e.g. they can have good diversity policies but weak environmental ones such as pollution (Jones et al., 2009, p. 301). Equally, one could use this concept and argue that all organisations are irresponsible to this or another extent and develop an argumentation that further extends the mirroring of the zeitgeist position. What is more, some authors argued that whilst some studies find a positive correlation between CSR and financial
