A cultural political economy of Corporate Social Responsibility

This chapter presents a cultural political economy (CPE) approach to the discourses and practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the context of global neo-liberal capitalism. CPE integrates the cultural turn into the critique of political economy. The idea that corporations have social obligations to serve the public interest dates back to the late nineteenth century. However, in the US, formal writing on social responsibility did not emerge until the twentieth century. In structural terms, the 1980s saw the stretching of global commodity and retail chains in the broader context of the rise and spread of neo-liberalism. Category management, which is a business practice that began in the supermarket business, allows giant retailers to improve sales and profits by managing product categories as separate business units with their own pricing. Empirically, this chapter uses CPE to examine how capitalism is changing in the neo-liberal age.