Corporate Social Responsibility: Development on Whose Terms?

This chapter surveys the emergence of “corporate social responsibility” as both a concept in business and management research and as a real-world practice in the globalized economy. It argues that for proponents and practitioners, corporate social responsibility represents a form of “re-embedded liberalism” that seek to ground corporate power in relationship to transnational governance organizations and non-governmental nonprofits. It critiques this arrangement’s capacity to advance development, insofar as it excludes and occludes the interests of communities in the Global South, for whom capital remains dis-embedded and unaccountable.