“My Country’s Future”: A Culture-Centered Interrogation of Corporate Social Responsibility in India

Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mitra, Rahul (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2012
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2012, Volume: 106, Issue: 2, Pages: 131-147
Further subjects:B Culture-centered approach
B Corporate social responsibility
B Emerging economies
B India
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Description
Summary:Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand out: nation-building facade, underlying neoliberal logics, CSR as voluntary, CSR as synergetic, and a clear urban bias. Next, I outline a CCA-inspired CSR framework that allows corporate responsibility to be re-claimed and re-framed by subaltern communities of interest. I identify such resistive openings via interrogations of culture (I focus on oft-cited Gandhian ethics here), structure (State policy, organizational strategy, and global/local flows), and agency (subaltern reframing of institutional responsibility, engagement with alternative modes of agency, and deconstructive vigilance).
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-0985-8