Questioning Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is today largely approached as a pragmatic question: a concern for practitioners, rather than theorists; a matter for participation, rather than anticipation; a challenge for doing, rather than thinking. This provocative new book directly challenges this tendency. It does so by underlining the extent to which contemporary discussions are limited by a severely narrowly conceived understanding of what can be done in the name of CSR. This general argument, for its part, is composed of three broad, yet fundamentally interrelated, aspects. Firstly, the book focuses upon the manner in which CSR's remit has become gradually narrowed down, perhaps somewhat paradoxically within the very works of some of its most devout advocates. Secondly, the book investigates the manner in which ethics, politics and economy are interrelated within the works of a variety of classical political philosophers. Finally, the book brings these two discussions into dialoguewith one another in an attempt to broaden out the range of responses that might still be made today towards the question of Corporate Social Responsibility. The book will be essential reading for anybody concerned with thinking through the consequences of the claim that corporations can, indeed should, be socially responsible, as well as for those concerned with revitalising the potential of a more or less systematically excluded tradition of questioning the nature of the common good.