The following is a short video from youtube about the benefits of these ideas.
The Questions I pose for discussion are:
Are these idea's realistically employable?
Can a change in corporate behavior change the values of society?
Can a change in corporate behavior help government and society "save the environment"?
This is an interesting post. Partly its interesting that I just saw another video by Zizek of all people (maybe we should just have a class on Zizek!) who addressed the idea of corporate social responsibility in a very different way. Zizek presents an argument that many new style corporations are essentially selling the act of participating in a social good as part of their product. He calls this a kind of cultural capitalism. This seems good on at least the level of the positive outcomes it generates. For example, buying coffee from Starbucks that is raised and harvested in a sustainable way provides a profit for best practice farmers. That's good. But at the same time, in a more critical light, by making political action part of the process of capitalist consumption, these new corporations are in some ways privatizing and defusing the political act. You don't have to become involved in a social movement to support coffee growing peasants in the developing world, you just have to buy Starbucks coffee. On a certain level, at least for Zizek and his critical followers, this makes political action a by-product of the act of capitalist consumption.
ReplyDeleteOn a basic level, I think this critical approach has a great deal going for it. At the minimum, you can't expect corporations to give up the idea of pursuing profits, after all that's the point of their existence. So inevitably in tying "social responsibility" to their bottom line, the primary emphasis is going to be on the bottom line itself.