Karl Polanyi and the Problem of Corporate Social Responsibility

Published date01 September 2015
Date01 September 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00718.x
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 42, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2015
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 434±59
Karl Polanyi and the Problem of Corporate Social
Responsibility
Lilian Moncrieff*
This article considers Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as part
of the projects in `new governance and decentred regulation', which
draw social forces towards the regulation of economic behaviour. It
uses Karl Polanyi to open up pertinent interfaces between society and
economy for observation, and Gunther Teubner to substantiate a
`regulatory' view of the company's social relationships. The article
finds that CSR combines movements for the recognition of social
relationships, on an unprecedented scale, with rigorous simultaneous
movements for market building and social abstraction. Twenty-first-
century market economy is defined by a capacity to contain `the
social,' which is thrown between the two movements, creating oppor-
tunities for companies to void the market's social limits. The article
counterposes that the social that `returns' after marketization needs
to find its way past market-building CSR, to constructively unshackle
and redefine the framing of social conflicts th at concern the
corporation.
INTRODUCTION
The place of social relations in the economy is a question that has long
transfixed social theorists, and never more so than in contemporary global
economy. The presentation of social relations as a given complexity, or a
fundamental creative source from which economic behaviour is always
constituted, is the `other' to economic theory's tendency towards neutrality,
434
*School of Law, Stair Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ,
Scotland
lilian.moncrieff@glasgow.ac.uk
With thanks to my colleagues at the School of Law and the anonymous peer reviewers for
their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
ß2015 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2015 Cardiff University Law School
abstraction, and rational self-sufficiency.
1
Social movements that speak to
(shared, differential) lived experiences of the global economy, and which
comment on patterns of inequality and exclusion, precarity and indebtedness,
attest to the simultaneous vulnerability and tenacity of this `other'.
2
Social
questions filter through, and partly coagulate, in institutional avenues such as
corporate social responsibility, responsible investment and consumption, the
greening of economic behaviour, business, and human rights. At the other
end of the spectrum, the long shadows cast by figures regularly subject to
intensification in the economic sphere ± environment, workers, debtors ±
represent a social domain that is difficult to completely eradicate, even at the
most abstract levels of economic exchange. The insistent `return' after
marketization, of environmental limits or the `Ninja' borrower, say, testifies
to a continuing vitality of the social and material relationships engaged, in
any era, by the market sphere.
3
This article considers the concept and practice of Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) within this project to understand the role and influence
of social relations on economic behaviour. It experiences, in CSR, a con-
fluence and institutionalization of the social question in respect of twenty-
first century global economy and, more specifically, the market participation
of its primary actors, the (multi- or transnational) corporations. The article
identifies, in the rise of CSR, an exposition of the value of social and
environmental constituents to market activities, which is communicated by
representatives of `the wider interests' to the enterprise actor.
4
This elabora-
tion emerges alongside, or after, an entanglement of social and environ-
mental factors with business practices, which flow from the organizing
principles of liberal markets concerning rational choice, self-interest, and the
pursuit of gain. Contesting or complicating abstractions in the market, which
concern social and environmental constituents, CSR mobilizations advance a
mix of instrumental and normative arguments for socially protective accom-
modations within the market. CSR's crucial efforts in responsibilization rely
on, and work with, a capacity for social influence, which is installed within
the economy. CSR draws on the participation of the wider interests and
works with their normative aspirations, or (decentred) attempts at defining
social standards and purposes, to `regulate' the corporation's pecuniary
interests. Working, in legal terms, with delegated regulatory action and
dispersed norm-creation activities in this way, is a strategic component of the
435
1 M. Granovet ter, `E conom ic acti on and so cial st ructu re: the p roble m of
embeddedness' (1985) 91 Am. J. of Sociology 481.
2 M. Burawoy, `Facing an unequal world' (2015) 63 Current Sociology 5.
3 The acronym `NINJA' refers to the `No Income, No Job or Assets' sub-prime
borrower of the 2008 crisis.
4 The term `wider interests' is used to reference social, environmental,and community
stakeholders, using `wider' in the sense of the United Kingdom Company Law
Review 1998±2001 and its consideration of CSR. Company Law Steering Group,
Modern Law for a Competitive Economy: the strategic framework (1999) ch. 5.
ß2015 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2015 Cardiff University Law School

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