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Political Corporate Social Responsibility: Including High Politics?

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Abstract

This article explores whether political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) may be better understood through its inclusion into the realm of high politics instead of its current characterization as belonging to low politics. The key argument is that the growing role of private companies in the provision of security is too widespread and its implications are too important to be ignored by the PCSR literature. By extending the scope of its inquiry into high politics, the insights from PCSR research could enrich the debates in several other social sciences that also study political roles of private companies. An interdisciplinary dialog about the numerous inroads of private companies into high politics could help the PCSR scholars in their quest to reach beyond an instrumental view of corporate politics.

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Notes

  1. The usual list of new security threats includes terrorism, organized crime, and proliferation of WMDs (Müller-Wille 2004, p. 11)

  2. The most frequently listed examples include banking and finance, government services, telecommunications and information and communication technologies, emergency and rescue services, energy and electricity, health services, transportation, logistics and distribution, and water supply. (Dunn-Cavelty and Kristensen 2008, pp. 1–2).

  3. For example, private companies “can coordinate their plans in advance regarding evacuation, transportation, and other issues; gain intelligence from law enforcement regarding threats and crime trends, develop relationships so that they will know who to contact for help or to report information; build law enforcement’s understanding of corporate needs, such as confidentiality; and boost law enforcement’s respect for the security field” (Dempsey 2011, p. 357).

  4. They considered only contributions by companies that are (1) political (in the sense that they involve activities that “work towards the creation and implementation of collectively binding rules and norms related to the provision of collective goods”); (2) intentional (e.g., not mere by-products of other business activities); (3) voluntary; and that (4) “directly and/or indirectly address the level of violence in an environment characterized by imminent, on-going or only very recently terminated interactions of physical violence” (Deitelhoff and Wolf, 2010 pp. 11–13).

  5. (1) The agents and agencies of state security always possess the potential to pose dangers to the very citizens they claim to protect, and they continue to so even today; (2) the publicness of security should also not conceal the extent to which public force was, and often still is, wielded in support of private or sectional interest under the guise of public good (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011, p. 113).

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Mitchell A. Belfer and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on this article. The usual disclaimer applies. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support of the Czech Science Foundation under the standard research Grant No. P408/11/0395.

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  1. Metropolitan University Prague, Dubecska 900/10, 100 31, Prague 10, Czech Republic

    Oldrich Bures

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Bures, O. Political Corporate Social Responsibility: Including High Politics?. J Bus Ethics 129, 689–703 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2200-1

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