Corkin, Joseph --- "Misappropriating Citizenship: The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility" [2008] ELECD 288; in Boeger, Nina; Murray, Rachel; Villiers, Charlotte (eds), "Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility

Editor(s): Boeger, Nina; Murray, Rachel; Villiers, Charlotte

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847205612

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Misappropriating Citizenship: The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility

Author(s): Corkin, Joseph

Number of pages: 25

Extract:

3. Misappropriating citizenship: the limits
of corporate social responsibility
Joseph Corkin

INTRODUCTION
Corporate social responsibility is a slippery concept with shifting definitions,
but at the very least involves a company going beyond its strict legal obliga-
tions to take into account the impact its business has on stakeholders other than
its shareholders. At its most idealistic, however, it calls for business to assume
a more social role; re-positioning companies as integral social partners from
whom good `corporate citizenship' is expected, rather than seeing them as
isolated entities, valued only for their wealth generating potential, but in need
of external control to prevent them damaging that which society holds dear. In
critiquing these more idealistic variants, this chapter only touches superficially
on the more or less sterile, empirical debates about business's capacity to regu-
late itself, versus the need for state intervention. It concentrates instead on why
that state intervention (or the threat of the same) is normatively desirable in
itself. In taking responsibility for promoting the social good, the state, in all its
manifest forms,1 realizes its citizens' popular sovereignty because it is via the
apparatus of the state that they, operating as equal members of a self-govern-
ing political community, exert control over the market, to push business
(whether directly, through formal legal intervention, or indirectly, by the threat
of the same) in what they consider a socially useful direction in which it would
otherwise not travel.
The idea of corporate social responsibility is generally ...