The Anti-CSR View: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom

1. The Anti-CSR View: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom Outline of paper • Arguments Opposing Social Responsibility • Expressions of the Anti-CSR View • The Economist’s Critique • Evidence of Backlash and Abandonment • Explanations of the Status of CSR • The Concept of Conventional Wisdom • Issue Life Cycle • Concluding Observations

2. Expressions of the Anti-CSR View Contemporary Media • Henderson’s Misguided Virtue: False Notions of Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR’s adoption threatens prosperity and undermines market economy. • The bourgeois virtues – prudence, honesty, reliability, self-control, courage to take risks, willingness to work hard. • CSR attempts to prevent corporations from profit making and encourages to engage in social exercises. • Bad press has put business on the defensive, and CSR gets nothing but good press. • Corporate “useful idiots” buy into CSR. • CSR a proposition which is impossible to argue. • “A plot to seize the political agenda by a small group environmental alarmists, aided by NGO activist thugs, self-serving consultants and pollsters, and corporate stooges who think they are being smart.”

3. The Economist’s Critique of CSR • Good Management • Borrowed Virtue • Pernicious CSR • Delusional CSR Evidence of Backlash • CSR Watch/SRI Watch • NGO – Christian Aid report • Greenwash • Emergence of Related Concepts

4. Explanations of the Status of CSR The Concept of Conventional Wisdom • Definition: an idea or structure of ideas that is widely acceptable at a point in time, or during a period of time, and its wide acceptability leads to its stability and predictability (Galbraith, 1958, 17-18) • Factors contributing to acceptability: • truth is associated with convenience in that it accords with self-interest • it contributes to self-esteem • people approve of what they understand • Applies to all ideologies, articulated on all levels of sophistication, and becomes more elaborate as time passes with large literature and even a mystique. • Challengers do not understand and position impregnable.

5. The Concept of Conventional Wisdom - Continued • Galbraith Quotation: “Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what all have heard before. Yet it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned. With so extensive a demand, it follows that a very large part of our social comment – and nearly all that is well regarded – is devoted at any time to articulated the conventional wisdom” (1958, 20). • Illustrations from evidence • The moral superiority of those practicing CSR (Bragues, 2002) • The good press received by CSR (Corcoran, 2004) and the threat of bad press (Salls, 2004) • The impossibility of arguing the counter view (Foster, 2005a) • The existence of few opponents or serious critics (Henderson, 2002) • The reasons for manager acceptance (Foster 2005b) and intimidation (Salls, 2004) • Reason for failure of conventional wisdom Obsolescence Failure to respond to change

6. Issue Life Cycle Explanation Traditional Life Cycle Enduring Life Cycle

7. Concluding Observations Responses to CSR • Social Enterprise – Non-profit • Social Enterprise – For profit • CSR Recognition • Tokenism or Greenwash • Amoral • Anti-CSR • Unknown, e.g. SME, private corporations White’s “Fade, Integrate or Transform?” Scenarios • Fad-and-Fade Scenario • Embed-and-Integrate Scenario • Transition-and-Transformation

8. Speculative Observations • Despite the CSR conventional wisdom, there is some evidence of an anti-CSR view. • Critics of CSR claim that it threatens prosperity in poor and rich countries as it undermines competition and economic freedoms. • Advocates of CSR are considered as anti-business, socialists and radicals. • Managers buy into CSR because they are either unaware of the dangers or they are intimidated. • CSR is of limited value as it is incapable of restraining socially harmful expressions of self-interest. • Capitalism’s success depends of a moral foundation based upon prudence, honesty, reliability, self-control, hard work, and decency (fairness and justice). • Some corporate failures have been attributed to CSR activities. • The acceptance of CSR and sustainability concepts implicitly acknowledges that business in irresponsible and unsustainable.