‘Corporate Social Responsibility’: A New Regulation of Capitalism? An Institutionalist Interpretative Framework of CSR, Based on the French Experience

The Fordist wage compromise may resemble an attempt to macroeconomically establish ethico-political rules governing the conflicting cooperation between capitalists and employees ( Aglietta, 1998 ; Boyer, 1993 ). The question of the relationship between ethics and economics is, thus, not contemporaneous with the CSR movement. It is particularly misleading to see this recent movement as a fundamental break with the era of relationships between capital and labour, or even, as a definitive and modern break with the old ‘conflicting’ form of productive relations. The Fordist compromise represents a very subtle and substantial means of linking ethics and efficiency, but it is situated at the macro-social level, in contrast to the CSR movement.