Searching for the Social: Corporate Social Responsibility and Economic Regulation Beyond the State.

摘要

The politics of "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) have been suggested as a way to help respond to some of the governance gaps caused by globalization. However, CSR struggles with the question of how critical it can be, and particularly whether it can condemn market agents as subjectively antisocial. CSR is thus perpetually caught between critics on the right who dismiss its real-world seriousness, and critics on the left who worry about its co-optation by the imperatives of business. Both camps suggest that focusing on workplace subjectivity is irrelevant and distracting. Meanwhile, "on the ground", activists plainly do just that. The question is what is lost, in terms of effective governance, when we deny that it is useful to challenge organizational personas and managerial subjectivities. To assess this, I deploy a governmentality analysis to pick apart how CSR politics typically weave together two distinct ways of thinking about regulation. These two "political rationalities" facilitate different discursive framing techniques and different political practices. I argue that CSR's more critical politics often flow from what Foucauldian scholars call "the social" or "social government". "Social government" champions a sense of our interdependence, and often targets the subjectivities of market agents as a way to extra-legally address market abuses. However, theorists have been lamenting the decline of "the social" for decades. What explains the continuing vitality of these supposedly irrelevant politics? I show that recent critical manifestations of CSR politics draw from under-theorized non-state modes of "the social", and are hybridized to fit an increasingly marketized world. These "social" politics can help us build theory about CSR phenomena, as these politics draw much of their normative power from implicit critiques of managerial subjectivities, and reflect only ephemerally any supposed social rules.