Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs in the British Press

An Ecofeminist Critique of Neoliberalism

Martina Topić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

An ecofeminist criticism of neoliberalism, this book uses economic growth, CSR and the press coverage of environmental affairs as a case study. The author argues that CSR is part of a wheel of neoliberalism that continually perpetuates inequality and the exploitation of women and Nature. Using an ecofeminist sense-making analysis of media coverage of food waste, global warming, plastic, economic growth and CSR, the author shows how the press discourse in writing is always similar and serves to preserve the status quo with CSR being just a smokescreen that saved capitalism and just one cog in the wheel of neoliberalism. While available research offers perspectives from business and public relations studies, looking at how CSR is implemented and how it contributes towards the reputation of businesses, this book explores how the media enforce CSR discourse while at the same time arguing for environmental preservation.

The book presents a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to explain how and why CSR is being pushed forward by the news media, and how the media preserves the status quo by creating moral panic on environmental issues while at the same time pushing for CSR discourse and economic growth, which only contributes towards environmental degradation. The original research presented in the book looks at how the media write about economic growth, plastics, food waste, CSR and global warming. This interdisciplinary study draws on ecofeminist theory and media feminist theory to provide a novel analysis of CSR, making the case that enforcing CSR as a way to do business damages the environment and that the media enforce a neoliberal discourse of promoting both economic growth and environmentalism, which does not go together.

Examining the UK media as a case study, a detailed methodological account is provided so that the study can be repeated and compared elsewhere. The book is aimed at academics and researchers in business and media studies, as well as those in women's studies. It will also be relevant to scholars in business management and marketing.

1 Introduction and personal reflection

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091592-1

The idea for this book did not start from a large project or a PhD thesis, but from a combination of various researches I’ve done since 2014. I first became aware of the corporate social responsibility concept when I accepted a job at Leeds Beckett University in 2014. I embarked on a second PhD and the original topic was in the field of cultural diplomacy and cultural imperialism following my first edited book (Topić & Rodin, 2012). On starting a job, I soon realised that universities are privatised and capitalist to the point that objectives, metrics and KPIs are the new divine in a marketised and liberalised higher education system such as the British one, and I was advised (in good faith) to change my PhD topic to fit more into School’s research agenda as this could then be useful for School’s REF policy. As a large part of the research agenda in Leeds Business School is centred on studying corporate social responsibility (CSR), I was advised to consider a topic around this area. Since I came from a journalistic professional background with experience in media research (including a first PhD tackling the role of the press in national movements), this naturally led towards a thesis studying CSR and the media, and I researched the coverage of the sugar debate and the supermarket industry in the British press (2010–2015) using an agenda-setting theory of the media. I argued that there are an anti-business hostility and bias in media writing and sourcing of stories on sugar and supermarkets where the press promotes a CSR agenda and actively advocates for the sugar agenda and pressurises supermarkets to subscribe to this agenda and engage in what I saw as undermining their own business model and refraining from selling and making a profit (Topić, 2020; Topić & Tench, 2018). I instantly found myself in cognitive dissonance because, from one side, I agreed with Milton Friedman and his view that corporations are not responsible for the well-being of society but only obliged to work for profit (Friedman, 1962, 1970). On the other side, I consider myself a socialist only to find myself supporting one of the most prominent capitalist names in the world of business and economic theory.

In the same way as with CSR, I found myself doing liberal feminist studies of looking at the glass ceiling and pay gap (Topić & Tench, 2018; Tench et al., 2017) and once again I felt discomfort for only tackling stuff I find fundamentally capitalist. Then I started looking at how women communicate where I initially did not find differences between men and women (Tench et al., 2017), but this did not grasp under the surface either. So I went back to the comfort zone of media research and looked at women in the media, which resulted in a programme of projects I was leading, studying lived experiences of women, the office culture and leadership in journalism, public relations and advertising industries. Throughout these explorations, I embraced a Difference Approach (Tannen, 1995, 1990, 1986; West & Zimmerman, 1983; Vukoičić, 2013; Merchant, 2012; Yule, 2006; Maltz & Borker, 1982) and Bourdieu’s (2007) habitus theory, and I started to develop the concept of blokishness and cultural masculinities in these industries (Topić & Tench, 2018; Topić, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021), thus tackling more structural issues with the equality and the fact women work in a masculine organisational culture and face expectations they cannot always meet (see also Mills, 2014, 2017; Gallagher, 2002; Ross, 2001; North, 2009a, 2009b, 2016a, 2016b; Lobo et al., 2017; Alvesson, 2013, 1998; Acker, 1990, 2006, 2009; Bourdieu, 2007; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Topić & Tench, 2018; Topić, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021). The Difference Approach is thus something that derived from my initial work on differences between men and women because while initially I just looked at the European Communications Monitor data and argued that women non-stereotypically show a preference towards what is normally considered as a masculine form of communication, which effectively refuted the Difference Approach (Tench et al., 2017), further research took me towards embracing it by discontinuing looking at large data and engaging in qualitative research, talking to women and studying cultural masculinities in organisations (Topić & Tench, 2018; Topić, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021). This research programme using the Difference Approach is relevant for this book because the Difference Approach has a link to ecofeminism in a sense that authors working in this field argue women and men are different and do things differently, yet organisations and societies, in general, seem to work in a masculine way (Nicolotti Squires, 2016; Mills, 2017, 2014; Topić & Tench, 2018; Topić, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021).

The works on women in journalism are particularly relevant because women have merged into the masculine culture of newspapers (Gallagher, 2002; Mills, 2014, 2017; Topić & Tench, 2018; Ross, 2001; North, 2009a, 2009b, 2016a, 2016b; Topić & Bruegmann, 2021), and this opens up a question whether we can expect any meaningful change in journalism practice if both men and women embrace masculinity. In journalism, this means hard news reporting and newsrooms remaining places for blokes, which impedes women from taking a stance different from the one of men (Gallagher, 2002; Mills, 2014; Ross, 2001; North, 2009a, 2009b, 2016a, 2016b; Topić & Tench, 2018; Topić & Bruegmann, 2021), and this has relevance for women because women have historically been more inclined to embrace environmentalism (Mallory, 2006; Brownhill & Turner, 2019; Goldstein, 2006; Leahy, 2003; McStay & Dunlap, 1983; Poole & Harmon Zeigter, 1985; Shapiro & Mahajan, 1986; Steger & Witt, 1989; Diani, 1989; Schahn & Holzer, 1990; Blaikie, 1992; Franklin & Rudig, 1992; Stern et al., 1993; McAllister, 1994; Hampel et al., 1996; Tranter, 1996; Godfrey, 2005; Shiva, 1989; Brownhill, 2010; Godfrey, 2008; Holy, 2007; Mann, 2011; Stoddart & Tindall, 2011; Giacomini, 2014; Kirk, 1998; McMahon, 1997; Salleh, 1984; Topić, 2020d; Topić et al., 2021); however, as they work in a masculine environment the question is to what extent can we expect women to drive change when journalism remains one of the bastions of masculinity.

Ecofeminism encompasses, in my view, elements of both radical and socialist feminism (as I have argued in some of my works, Topić, 2020b; Topić et al., 2021), and nevertheless, there is a branch of ecofeminism called socialist ecofeminism. This approach is particularly suitable for analysing the CSR discourse and the media agenda on CSR-related topics because ecofeminism is fundamentally an anti-capitalist theory but the one, unlike for ecosocialist theory, that links capitalism with patriarchy and argues that the oppression of women and Nature are interlinked and,

the late 20th century crises – social and environmental – are inevitable because of “masculine” values and behaviours. The keystone of this destructive patriarchalism is identified in the everyday notion that men represent the sphere of “humanity and culture”, while women, indigenes, children, animals, plants, and so on, are part of “nature” […] Ecofeminists focus on the dominant Eurocentric industrial capitalist patriarchal formation and its material impacts.

Salleh (2001a, p. 109, emphasis in original; see also Salleh, 2000; Waldron, 2003; Sydee & Beder, 2001)

In the case of CSR, an ecofeminist approach helps in understanding why CSR seems to be such a stalemate and the debate does not move forward from describing the phenomenon and making claims that CSR helps. Ecofeminism made me ask myself, CSR helps but to whom and to do what precisely? Thus, through the reading of the ecofeminist critique of capitalism, I concluded that CSR must be studied in the context of capitalism because corporations are capitalist enterprises and we have to examine the concept of CSR within a capitalist framework. What is more, journalism also needs to be examined in the context of capitalism because media organisations are also nowadays profitable capitalist enterprises and are prone to influence from owners and other corporations because of advertising income (Sandoval, 2013; Mosco, 2009; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Garnham, 1998). Ecofeminist theory links capitalism with patriarchy (saed, 2017; Brownhill & Turner, 2020; Sydee & Beder, 2001; Delveaux, 2001), thus proving a rounded up concept for the analysis.

When it comes to CSR, while the mainstream literature on CSR...