Towards a practice turn in critical management studies : manifesting a dream through NGO engagement with corporate social responsibility

This research takes an anamorphic gaze on how to influence the development of social responsible business practice by looking at how non-government organisations (NGOs) collaborate with corporations. The study proposed that a strategically motivated type of NGO engagement can uncover new attitudes to the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and offer insights into how the application of Critical Management Studies (CMS) can change from a relatively static analytical exercise to a more dynamic critical form of enterprise practice. The study challenges the traditional business-centric understanding of CSR. Particularly, it shifts the focus. CSR is often thought of in business terms as a type of practice where corporations have a choice about how they might contribute to society. This is sometimes framed as a corporate duty to contribute to the economy, obey laws, be ethical and philanthropically contribute to society (Carroll 1991). This business-centric perspective of CSR is almost exclusively focused on the corporation and its own imperatives and inclinations to unilaterally address its social responsibilities. However, the more transformative perspective of CSR adopted in this research allows other sectors of society to contribute to a corporation’s socially responsible conduct. Motivated by their own interests, these sectors can be understood to have the capacity to exert a level of influence over corporations. This approach draws on a CSR tradition that Utting (2002) refers to as the ‘regulatory frame of CSR’. The regulatory perspective enables policy based entities, private firms, and civil society organisations to monitor – to “regulate” – corporate activity, to intervene when appropriate and to influence corporations in how they exercise their social responsibilities. This is depicted in Utting’s (2002) three dimensions of CSR: ‘command and control’, ‘corporate self-regulation’ and ‘stakeholder co-regulation’. The dimension of ‘stakeholder co-regulation’ forms the frame of this research. This regulatory perspective of CSR can be understood to have similar principles to Critical Management Studies (CMS). CMS is a research construct that challenges those management activities and practices that appear to subjugate human needs and desires to the institutional profit-seeking tendencies of corporations (Fournier & Grey 2000). Both CMS and the regulatory practice of CSR take a problem-centred focus on the question of corporation behaviour in society; and both have an agenda for change. These similarities draw a connection between the two theoretical frames, and this link provides a channel by which the regulatory frame of CSR could be imagined and understood in the context of CMS. In this regulatory frame of CSR, the research has focused specifically on how NGOs participated in ‘co-regulating’ corporations to work together on developing socially responsible business practice. In particular, the study concentrated on how NGOs use collaborative processes to do this. I developed a multi-phased action research framework to provide a scaffold for the collaboration between the NGOs and corporations, and to mitigate some of the risks associated with the NGOs being co-opted to the corporate perspectives. The framework included a synthesis of action learning and appreciative inquiry approaches. Three NGOs from Australia’s social services sector were recruited for the study. Each adapted the Action Research framework to suit their own needs and objectives for their engagement with the private sector. One of the NGOs used action learning and appreciative inquiry processes to support corporations to participate in community projects. Another chose to use appreciative inquiry for the same purpose. In contrast, the third NGO used action learning processes to resolve some of its internal challenges to corporate engagement. The NGOs were found to have drawn on action learning and appreciative inquiry as separate and distinct processes, but in interconnected and complementary ways. The research revealed that the NGOs were not seeking to ‘co-regulate’ corporate behaviour in the Utting (2002) tradition: they were not looking to monitor corporate activity and they were not looking to influence it for the purposes of improving the corporation’s social performance. Instead, the NGOs had sought to design and direct the manner in which corporations could participate in addressing community-based aims and objectives. This pointed to the existence of an additional frame of CSR; one that moved beyond the ‘regulatory’ frames, to adopt a ‘developmental agenda’ that was more visionary. This type of CSR offered scope to extend Utting’s (2002) regulatory-based framework to include a developmental dimension that I refer to as: ‘stakeholder-directive co-development’. The developmental frame denotes instances where stakeholders direct corporations about how they can participate in achieving stakeholder objectives. This study makes a contribution to knowledge by uncovering stakeholder-directive co-development as a new frame of CSR. This new frame offers an opportunity to challenge the dominant, problem-centred perspective of corporate activity adopted in CSR and CMS. The implications of this indicate that the ‘problem-centred heart’ of these frames may not advance the kind of social change dreamt of by those who pursue CSR and CMS. Through this dissertation I propose that the inclusion of a stakeholder-directive co-development agenda could confer the missing ‘link’ needed to transform those social dreams into a reality