Contextualizing Corporate Political Responsibilities : Neoliberal CSR in Historical Perspective

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a buzzword those days. A rich and dense scholarly literature has emerged over the last few years around the concept of CSR and its contemporary consequences (e.g. Aguinis and Glavas, 2012, Segerlund 2010, Matten and Moon 2008, Garriga and Melé 2004). In general, this literature has focused upon the diffusion of organizational and/or institutional practices and processes characteristic of the contemporary trend of corporate social responsibility – over the last fifty years. In contrast, this article focuses specifically on the nature of CSR before it was even called CSR and seeks to bring back the role of time and history into contemporary theorizing on CSR. More specifically, it will argue that recent scholarly work on a “political turn” of CSR starts from a problematic foundation that does not hold in historical perspective – the taken-for-granted null hypothesis of a separation between public and private spheres. Exploring this fundamental relationship from an historical perspective is important, we suggest, to rethink the modern division of responsibility between business and government