In Good Company

An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility

Dinah Rajak

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804781619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporations have become increasingly important players in international development. These days, CSR's union of economics and ethics is virtually unquestioned as an antidote to harsh neoliberal reforms and the delinquency of the state, but nothing is straightforward about this apparently win-win formula. Chronicling transnational mining corporation Anglo American's pursuit of CSR, In Good Company explores what lies behind the movement's marriage of moral imperative and market discipline.

From the company's global headquarters to its mineshafts in South Africa, Rajak reveals how CSR enables the corporation to accumulate and exercise power. Interested in CSR's vision of social improvement, Rajak highlights the dependency that the practice generates. This close examination of Africa's largest private sector employer not only brings critical attention to the dangers of corporate dominance, but also provides a lens through which to reflect on the wider global CSR movement.

1 ‘Let Business Lift Africa Out of Poverty’

Global Corporate Citizenship—A New Orthodoxy

Who better than Coca Cola, a firm with a better distribution network in sub-Saharan Africa than any aid agency, to get materials out to needy populations? . . . Exhortation not regulation!

(David Cameron, British Prime Minister [then Conservative Party Leader], Annual Business in the Community Conference, 9 May 2006)

IN JULY 2000 KOFI ANNAN (then UN Secretary-General) announced the inauguration of a new Global Compact between business and civil society, symbolically unleashing the vast potential of enterprise in the realm of development:

Let us choose to unite the power of markets with the authority of universal ideals. Let us choose to reconcile the creative forces of private entrepreneurship with the needs of the disadvantaged (26 July 2000, New York).

In the years preceding and following the launch, the CSR movement gained momentum, recruiting support from seemingly diverse corners and creating coalitions between unexpected partners eager to realise this union of global markets and universal ideals. The primacy of the market as the panacea to poverty has been resoundingly proclaimed not only by leaders of transnational corporations and multilateral development institutions, but increasingly by NGOs held up to represent the ‘voice of civil society’. Drawing on idioms of emancipation through the market, CSR has thus demonstrated a great capacity to unite disparate actors (and former combatants) in an apparently mutual enterprise of sustainable development. While Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Anglo American and Shell, commands us to ‘let business lift Africa out of poverty’¹, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reminds readers of the Financial Times in a half page advertisement that, ‘the poor need business to invest in their future. Business needs the poor because they are the future’ (UNDP 2005).

This exuberance in the public arena has been matched (and reinforced) by academic tributes from scholars heralding CSR (and its corollary corporate citizenship) as the new hope for development where global corporations transcend the pitfalls of state-led development and the politics of national government²:

Never before has a partnership been created between the highest levels of the UN, business, NGOs and labour representatives. Never before has such a partnership had the open-ended mandate of furthering the core UN conventions and declarations covering labour standards, human rights and the environment . . . The stakes are high . . . the potential gains are immense (Zadek 2001: 102).

One theme emerges most strongly from the literature on CSR, whether from insiders or analysts, advocates or critics: that CSR is a truly global phenomenon, exercised through supranational networks of governance and ethical standards³. Codes, norms and standards thus appear as components of a new global ‘moral order’ (Harper 2000). But this preoccupation with the global dimension of CSR—whether as an instrument of social improvement worldwide, or a tool of global governmentality—has resulted in an analysis of CSR disembedded from its social practice. We are left asking, how is this new orthodoxy of ‘compassionate capitalism’ and corporate responsibility forged? And, what actors and interests work towards sustaining, reinforcing and extending its power?

The main purpose of this chapter is to shed light on these processes, and in particular the ritualised and performative dynamics of CSR, which I argue, are crucial to establishing it as development orthodoxy. I trace the performance of CSR through the circuit of conventions and conferences, policy forums, multi-partner roundtables and award ceremonies that constitute the elite ‘global’ arena of corporate citizenship, or put another way, the social life of CSR. For it is here that we begin to disentangle the agency of various actors—from captains of industry to representatives of the ‘grass roots’, from business schools to UN agencies—involved in the production of this powerful discourse; and we begin to see the effects of this apparent shift from agonistic to collaborative, from conflictual to consensual. This alerts us to one of the most striking aspects of the CSR movement: the role of national governments, often described by corporate executives and their NGO counterparts alike as ‘missing in action’, as they are noticeable as much by their absence as their presence.

Within these arenas corporate executives come together with representatives of global NGOs, and the growing army of CSR consultants or ‘professionals’, from dozens of small firms or non-profits (the boundary between which is often blurred). Participants extol the virtues of bi-, tri- or multi-sector partnerships, develop international standards and initiatives to improve the global reach of the CSR movement; and present case studies describing ‘best-practice’ or ‘lessons-learnt’ from their engagement with ‘local communities’, the subjects of their ethical endeavours. Such gatherings unfold as highly ritualistic theatres of virtue in which awards for the best corporate citizen are presented and inspiring stories of social responsibility are told.

The celebration of corporate virtue, underpinned by a moral register of compassionate capitalism, seems to clash with the commitment to ‘market rationality’ espoused in the language of ‘the business case for CSR’, ‘enlightened self-interest’, and not least, ‘the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’. This reveals what at first appears to be a peculiar contradiction at play in the production of CSR. On the one hand the invocation of markets as the cure for poverty strives to reaffirm the commitment to a supposedly amoral capitalist rationality—the fundamental logic of maximisation. On the other hand, this vision of business-led development underwritten by an ideal of corporate citizenship is anything but amoral. As I argue throughout the book, the confluence of these two apparently discordant discourses—moral mission and market rationalism—is not only central to the performance of corporate social responsibility, but fundamental to the production and expansion of corporate capitalism.

The ethnographic focus of the chapter is London, global financial capital, home to some of the world’s largest multinationals and central hub of the booming industry in CSR. As in cities worldwide, one is continuously met with testaments to corporate citizenship. The rhetoric of sustainable development is emblazoned on bus stops advertising BP (newly incarnated as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ rather than ‘British Petroleum’). Standard Bank promises to ‘bank the unbanked’ across Africa. And, even BAE Systems (the world’s second biggest defence contractor) advertises its social responsibility on the London underground beneath the slogan ‘making the world a safer place’⁴. Thus a senior economist and CSR advisor for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) remarked at a 2005 CSR industry event in London: ‘I have always viewed London as being the CSR capital of the world—all the leading CSR organisations are within a five mile radius of where we are now. I think the London CSR community has done a great service to the world, getting governments, business and NGOs to work together’. As a central site of CSR performance, London thus comes to stand for ‘the global’, an abstract site de-localized and detached from its UK context, where corporate elites and development policy-makers converge in the service of development; put another way, where ‘global-thinking’ goes on, and is then crystallized in international codes of conduct, standards, social technologies and reporting schemes. The ethical regimes which emerge from such coalitions are widely seen as new forms of global governance through which accountability, or the appearance of it, is rendered. The corollary to this performance of global corporate citizenship, is the ‘local’, framed around a moral imaginary of ‘community’ which provides the intended target of these cosmopolitan coalitions. It is here, according to the constant refrain ‘think global, act local’, that the abstracted ideals of corporate responsibility become tangible as they give rise to empowerment projects, socio-economic development funds, and even the solid concrete bricks of HIV clinics and mine schools: the localised products of ‘ethical capitalism’. Thus, the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ are seamlessly woven together in a coherent narrative of good corporate citizenship.

The ubiquitous exhortation to ‘partnership’ is of course nothing new in the development industry. Nor is the power of the partnership paradigm to assert equality and consensus, where in fact inequality and difference reign, as anthropologists of development have shown⁵. In the case of CSR however, the concept of partnership has demonstrated even broader appeal, and greater discursive power, in its capacity to manufacture apparent consensus in a shared enterprise, as all parties proclaim a collaborative venture for a collective goal of sustainable development and elevate ‘the global market’ as the fundamental mechanism through which this can be achieved. For, as the business-led paradigm of development recruits support from distant corners it asserts a global, national and indeed local alliance between business and society, and thus a congruence of values between the logic of maximisation and the moral imperatives of development.

Theatres of Virtue

In October 2005 senior executives from several of the world’s biggest TNCs (including Anglo American, Shell, Vodaphone and Coca Cola) came together with numerous consultants in search of contracts, and NGO representatives (those willing or able to pay the £695 per day fee) at the Regent’s Park Marriott Hotel in London, for a convention hosted by Ethical Corporation on ‘The New Role of Business in Development’. ‘The real reason for being in business is to create wealth’ the poster announced, ‘so is it good business to join the fight against poverty?’ As if in response, the conference was opened by the director of the Shell Foundation, Kurt Hoffman, forcefully asserting the new orthodoxy of a business-led development agenda:

The challenge in 2005 is not to restate the problems but to apply business thinking and come up with solutions . . . So Tony Blair’s Africa Commission—which has placed a welcome emphasis on the role of the private sector—needs to push the pro-poor enterprise agenda even further⁶.

The underlying theme of Hoffman’s speech was the failure of development led by a reactionary parochial state sector burdened with a moral mission of upliftment—the modern day legacy of, as he put it, ‘the white man’s burden’. The solution, according to Hoffman, is to be found in the world of big business, where technocratic efficiency comes together with competitive creativity. ‘Let us choose to unite the power of markets’ he announced, quoting Kofi Annan’s battle cry. Yet in spite of the avowed market logic of this corporate discourse of development, Hoffman went on to invoke Truman’s inaugural address of 1949, harking back to the profoundly moral vision of progress and state-led development that he had just consigned to the failures of the past:

I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life . . . Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace and the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge (Hoffman 2005, quoting Truman’s Inaugural Address 1949).

Hoffman’s speech thus exemplifies the slippage between seemingly discordant registers of scientistic rationalism and moral imperative, interweaving contemporary paradigms of sustainable development with anachronistic notions of corporate virtue to produce a compelling master narrative of corporate citizenship. Put another way, as the resident anthropologist at one of Anglo American’s ‘rival’ mining companies remarked: ‘we used to say “god bless you”, now we say “let’s have sustainable development!” Sometimes, I’m not entirely sure what the difference is.’

The next speaker on the conference bill, a representative from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), echoed the dominant economistic equation: poverty eradication through access to expanding markets, and profit generation through the vast reserve of untapped customers and aspirant entrepreneurs in developing countries:

What’s the point in expanding markets? The market creates opportunities. When you’re cut out of the market, you’re cut out of the social system, you’re not empowered. We don’t want to squeeze out development agencies—they can still do development . . . One unique contribution that business provides is enterprise—enterprising ways out of poverty, this isn’t about doing good, it’s about providing environments for enterprise.

According to this equation the market comes to stand for the social system as a whole. Questions concerning the inequitable distribution of wealth vanish as poverty is recast within this depoliticised framework, due simply to a lack of market opportunities.

Implicit within this vision of empowerment is an ideal (entrepreneurial) actor who can respond to the moral exhortation to embrace the opportunities provided by expanding business, and uplift him- or herself out of poverty as they are brought into the global market⁷. However the mission of CSR goes far beyond the apparent benefits of foreign direct investment and market growth. It offers instead a vision of caring corporations that is a far cry from hard-line neoliberalism. As David Cameron’s statement quoted above exemplifies, TNCs are now urged to engage whole-heartedly with the developmental needs and goals of the countries and communities in which they operate, helping to build stable affluent societies with the aim of establishing the conditions for further investment. As such, CSR has figured prominently in recent white papers and policy reports of bilateral and multilateral development agencies. In their 2003 report on DFID and Corporate Social Responsibility, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) went so far as to discourage any move towards ‘internationally legally binding frameworks for multinational companies’, arguing that a mandatory approach of this kind ‘may divert attention and energy away from encouraging corporate social responsibility and towards legal process’ (DFID 2003: 9). This highlights the dominant commitment to voluntarism as a mechanism for harnessing the innate competitive ingenuity of business, and the rejection of regulation which have become the mainstay of CSR discourse, propounded by both corporations and many of their partners in development.

Speaker after speaker repeated the refrain of doing good business to do good, attended by compelling promises of ‘collective responsibility’, ‘common goals’ and ‘win-win solutions’ or as the representative from the OECD proposed: ‘get business to do what they do best . . . making profits and protecting our people and planet!’⁸. Positioned at the centre of the global economy with their extensive resources and drive for efficiency, TNCs are seen to be perfectly placed not only to implement this agenda but to lead it. Cameron’s exhortation—‘who better than Coca Cola . . . to get materials out to needy populations’ could be heard in various forms from executives and NGOs alike at the conference. Thus the director of the International Business Leaders Forum’s (IBLF) Partnering Initiative and author of numerous manuals and ‘how-to’ books on business-NGO partnerships explained: ‘Business knows how to operate in certain parts of the world better than development agencies because of their reach—we should follow them into Africa . . . There’s so much room for business to teach NGOs how to bring business into development’. We were left in no doubt of this when a representative from the UK-based NGO Business in the Community told the speaker from Anglo American: ‘we would love to have a lesson from the university of Anglo American in community social empowerment, let us learn from you’.

This conference on the ‘New Role of Business in Development’ was only one in the annual cycle of conferences hosted by Ethical Corporation, such as ‘Climate Change: How to Get your Message Across to Consumers’ (March 2007); or ‘How to Make Ethical Branding Work’ (November 2006). But Ethical Corporation is not the only organisation in the CSR event business. Each year scores of events, from large-scale conferences to one-day training and discussion workshops are hosted by the likes of Business in the Community, Chatham House, and the IBLF. These gatherings usually take place in top London hotels at which participants are treated to ‘business-leaders’ breakfasts’, fine lunches and leather-bound conference packs. Common are joint panel presentations by the CSR executive of a TNC, coupled with the representative from a partner NGO offering ‘best-practice’ case studies and ‘lessons-learnt’ from their shared experience.

One of the most commonly discussed questions at CSR events was ‘how do we get sustainable development into the DNA of business and change its genetic code?’ At the same time, the shift towards a corporate model of development has reversed the question to ask: ‘how do we get business DNA into development and NGOs?’ (chairman, Ethical Corporation Conference ‘The New Role of Business in Development, 18–19 October 2005). Picking up the anthropomorphism inherent in the notion of corporate citizenship, humanising metaphors which present companies as sentient beings rather than impersonal machines are ubiquitous in the discourse of CSR. Crucially, the concept of corporate citizenship claims on behalf of the company a moral self. Companies thus emerge as ‘citizens’, complete with conscience, culture, DNA and even heart, through which their moral agency is apparently exercised⁹. One NGO partner of Anglo American, for example, said of the company: ‘as a corporate they do have a heart!’¹⁰. Similarly, the CEO of Anglo American herself states in the company’s 2008 Report to Society: ‘for Anglo American, there is simply no choice or trade-off . . . It is part of our DNA, embedded in our culture, and is fundamental to the way we do business’ (Anglo ...