Corporate social responsibility and the transformation of American corporate capitalism: An ethnographic study

How is corporate social responsibility relevant to corporations that are profit making rather than sharing entities? And how are individual companies coming to embrace corporate social responsibility in their daily business practices? These are the questions asked in this dissertation, which is a study into the mass mediating discourse of corporate social responsibility and its local consumption and reproduction. Approaching corporate social responsibility as a discourse and using data gathered at a consulting company that sought to disseminate and a corporation that wished to reproduce it, this dissertation examines how corporations use material and linguistic objects (e.g., commodities, gifts, and languages and images of marketing and public relations) to make social responsibility an inhabitable category of identity. Throughout the work, what is shown is that through intake and uptake of the corporate social responsibility discourse, corporations are reconfiguring themselves as social persons (vis-à-vis, legal persons with rights) and positioning themselves as citizens of a community, consist of those that have stakes in common. The significance of this work is that it documents a qualitative change taking place in today’s American corporate settings. Namely, profit sharing and redistribution is no longer antonymic to but is made reinvestment: But in a modified framework of accounting and a conceptualization of growth that accounts for returns on a lengthened time scale and a broadened scope—one resembling a gift exchange framework, which Mauss wrote of long ago