This volume presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a series of economic and political strategies that are currently shifting the focus of international human rights activism and signalling the rise of new forms of global governance. In as much as the work demonstrates the limitations of CSR and offers a critical perspective on corporate techniques of market domination, it also posits a future for CSR within the human rights movement.

"This textbook provides an innovative, internationally oriented approach to the teaching of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics. Drawing on case studies involving companies and countries around the world, the textbook explores the social, ethical, and business dynamics underlying CSR in such areas as global warming, genetically modified organisms (GMO) in food production, free trade and fair trade, anti-sweatshop and living-wage movements, organic foods and textiles, ethical marketing practices and codes, corporate speech and lobbying, and social enterprise. The book is designed to encourage students and instructors to challenge their own assumptions and prejudices by stimulating a class debate based on each case study"--Provided by publisher.

One of America's most distinguished economists, Neil H. Jacoby has served as a public member of the Phase II pay board, an economic adviser to President Eisenhower, founding dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Management, and a consultant to numerous government agencies and private corporations. In "Corporate Power And Social Responsibility" he gives a thorough, objective "social assessment" of the American corporation. He identifies trends which point to a changing corporate role at home and abroad and he offers creative reforms of corporate and public policy which will promote a more "just, efficient, creative and democratic society." Jacoby finds no evidence to support New Left charges that the U.S. has become a "corporate state." In fact, he says, corporate political power is waning, conglomeration is tapering off, the corporate share of the nation's wealth is holding steady at 28%. Competition, says Jacoby, is on the increase. Where price and quality of materials and manufacturing were once the only factors, mushrooming technology, new business practices and new markets have created new competitive pressures. An increasing variety of product features, services, warranties, credit terms and trade-in allowances have multiplied consumer choices. As a smaller and smaller proportion of personal income is spent on necessities, competition between different kinds of products has become more important (should discretionary income go for a sail boat or a trip to Europe?). In many industries, increasing competition from foreign manufacturers is a factor. Rapid changes in business practices and technology have even made potential competition from entering firms and new products animportant consideration. Still, Jacoby sees much need for improvement. He proposes measures to increase the political power of the consumer, upgrade the performance of boards of directors, expand the involvement of stockholders in company decision-making, encourage environmental responsibility, and make defense companies function efficiently. For the future, Jacoby predicts the continued decline of corporate power as government regulation expands and new, competing interest blocs spring up. At the same time corporations will become more responsive to changing social values and priorities. The rapid growth of multinational firms, he believes, will increase the stability of the world order and promote the growth of regional and world-wide political organization.

Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume available on the question of just how "social" business ought to be. The volume includes contributions from the fields of communication, business, law, sociology, political science, economics, accounting, and environmental studies. Moreover, it draws from experiences and examples from around the world, including but not limited to recent corporate scandals and controversies in the U.S. and Europe. A number of the chapters examine closely the basic assumptions underlying the philosophy of socially responsible business. Other chapters speak to the practical challenges and possibilities for corporate social responsiblilty in the twenty-first century. One of the most distinctive features of the book is its coverage of the very ways that the issue of corporate social responsibility has been defined, shaped, and discussed in the past four decades. That is, the editors and many of the authors are attuned to the persuasive strategies and formulations used to talk about socially responsible business, and demonstrate why the talk matters. For example, the book offers a careful analysis of how certain values have become associated with the business enterprise and how particular economic and political positions have been established by and for business. This book will be of great interest to scholars, business leaders, graduate students, and others interested in the contours of the debate over what role large-scale corporate commerce should take in the future of the industrialized world.

There is ample evidence about the negative effects business activity of all types can have on the provision of human rights. Equally, there can be little doubt economic development, usually driven through business activity and trade, is necessary for any state to provide the institutions and infrastructure necessary to secure and provide human rights for their citizens. The United Nations and businesses recognise this tension and are collaborating to effect change in business behaviours through voluntary initiatives such as the Global Compact and John Ruggie’s Guiding Principles. Yet voluntary approaches are evidently failing to prevent human rights violations and there are few alternatives in law for affected communities to seek justice. This book seeks to robustly challenge the current status quo of business approaches to human rights in order to develop meaningful alternatives in an attempt to breech the gap between the realities of business and human rights and its discourse. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights.

Spanning the complete era of the Conservative governments and the first term of New Labour, this book looks at mechanisms of corporate power and influence; corporate opinion and influence in a range of social policy areas including: education, training, health and social security; changing business influence on social policy in recent years in an international context and business involvement in social policy initiatives and welfare delivery. By exploring business views and opinions, power, influence and involvement in social provision, this book helps to address important questions in social policy and, in so doing, goes some way towards closing a gaping hole in the current literature. The book's breadth and multidisciplinary approach will appeal not only to students of social policy, but also to students of business, public sector management and politics, their teachers and policy makers in the field.

This book has many merits. It will make fascinating reading for the increasing number of organizational scholars who wonder how organizational research can engage more in accounting for the impact of corporations on their environment in a broad sense. Bahar Ali Kazmi, Bernard Leca and Philippe Naccache, Organization Studies This book is for those who will enjoy a thoughtful and informative monograph that acutely summarises and refreshes critique from a political and sociological perspective. It is a comprehensive re-interpretation of the corporate world and the evidently meretricious regime of CSR which makes it an enjoyable compendium for critical management studies fans . . this erudite volume will be valuable to mainstream, social science academics either involved in (or dismissive of) CSR and sustainability discourses in management education and research. David Bevan, Scandinavian Journal of Management Banerjee s book is thought provoking and must be read. But it should be read not only by corporate social responsibility scholars but by all business scholars. It is through Banerjee s provocations that we can understand the shortcomings of corporate systems and the boundaries of corporate social responsibility. Pratima Bansal, Administrative Science Quarterly This is a tour de force that carefully assembles and incisively interrogates perhaps the most pressing problem of our age: how to harness the resources of corporations to tackle global problems of poverty, oppression and environmental degradation? Banerjee does not present us with glib pronouncements or simplistic fixes. Instead, he brilliantly illuminates the scale of the challenges and lucidly assesses the relevance and value of CSR responses to date. Hugh Willmott, University of Cardiff, UK Bobby Banerjee takes on the popular mythologies of neo-liberal corporate social responsibility with enviable flair and a thoroughness of scholarship that will dismay its apologists. His critique extends from the origins of the modern corporation and its well-known abuses and excesses to far harder targets the more attractive alternatives that have been developed for theory and practice that, as Banerjee shows brilliantly, only serve to mask continuing neo-colonial abuses. Banerjee is not content simply to expose the impossibilities of doing good works whilst maximizing shareholder value, the win-win view of CSR, but he bites the bullet with some uncompromising but realistic proposals for the future reconstruction of CSR both as a field of study and as a business practice. We have needed this exposure of the bad and the ugly for a long time. The current versions of CSR are simply just not good enough. Stephen Linstead, University of York, UK Banerjee pulls the beguiling mask off corporate social responsibility. Taking the vantage point of the world s poor, he shows CSR to be a cruel hoax corporations cynical effort to undermine growing demands for economic and environmental justice. Paul S. Adler, University of Southern California, US This book problematizes the win-win assumption underlying discourses of CSR and suggests that it is a rhetoric that is invariably subordinated to that of corporate rationality. Rather than see CSR as providing the means to transform corporations by advocating a stakeholder view of the firm it argues that CSR represents an ideological movement designed to consolidate the power of transnational corporations and provide a veneer of liberality to the illiberal economic agenda of the major global institutions. Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Professor Banerjee offers us a refreshing analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in an otherwise comparatively turgid literary landscape. People may disagree with his criticism that because of its preoccupation with shareholder value, the corporation is an inappropriate agent for social change but it is backed up by strong theoretical and substantive empirical