When Corporations Cause Harm: A Critical View of Corporate Social Irresponsibility and Corporate Crimes
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ORIGINAL PAPER
When Corporations Cause Harm: A Critical View of Corporate Social Irresponsibility and Corporate Crimes Rafael Alcadipani1 · Cíntia Rodrigues de Oliveira Medeiros2 Received: 5 January 2018 / Accepted: 3 April 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Corporations perform actions that can inflict harm with different levels of intensity, from death to material loss, to both companies’ internal and external stakeholders. Research has analysed corporate harm using the notions of corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) and corporate crime. Critical management studies (CMS) have been subjecting management and organizational practices and knowledge to critical analysis, and corporate harm has been one of the main concerns of CMS. However, CMS has rarely been deployed to analyse CSIR and corporate crime. Thus, the aim of this paper is to critically analyse the perspectives of CSIR and corporate crimes on corporate harm via CMS in general and postcolonial studies in particular. The paper contributes by arguing that research on CSIR and corporate crime could be perceived as producing research that does not challenge the essence of contemporary corporation profit-seeking activities that ultimately produces corporate harm. We argue that CSIR and corporate crime are ideologies that assist in disguising the contradiction between producing shareholder value and the social good that is at the heart of the modern corporation system and the current economic system. Furthermore, the postcolonial view of CSIR and corporate crime highlights how they are based on a Westerncentric view of corporate harm that ignores the realities and perspectives of the Global South, especially in situations where corporate harm leads to death in the Global South. Keywords Corporate social irresponsibility · Corporate crime · Critical management studies
Introduction There has been considerable evidence that corporations can inflict harm on society. Recent episodes such as the cases of the Union Carbide Bhopal factory in India (Walters 2009), the 2010 British Petroleum Oil environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (Lin-Hi and Blumberg 2011), the 2008 financial crisis (Woods 2009) and the Vale dam collapses in We are very grateful to Maria Fernanda Cavalcanti, the associate editor and the anonymous reviewers who gave a lot of insightful feedbacks to our paper. * Rafael Alcadipani [email protected] Cíntia Rodrigues de Oliveira Medeiros [email protected] 1
Fundação Getulio Vargas/EAESP, 474 Itapeva St., São Paulo, Brazil
Fundação Getulio Vargas – EAESP, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, 2121 João Naves de Avila Av., Uberlândia, Brazil
2
Brazil that caused severe harms to the cities of Mariana in 2015 and Brumadinho in 2019. Furthermore, almost every year, there is at least one significant worldwide corporate scandal creating suffering for a large number of people. Research has used the term corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) to designate such phenomena, which are characterized by “unethical and morally distastefu
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