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Activism and Abdication on the Inside: The Effect of Everyday Practice on Corporate Responsibility

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Abstract

While mainstream CSR research has generally explored and argued for positive ethical, social and environmental performance, critical CSR scholars argue that change has been superficial—at best, and not possible in any substantial way within the current capitalist system. Both views, however, only address the role of business within larger systems. Little attention has been paid to the everyday material CSR practice of individual managers. We go inside the firm to investigate how the micro-level acts of individual managers can aggregate to drive transformation of the macro-level business logic. We draw on the strategy-as-practice approach to organize our research. The study reveals two orientations towards the integration of personal ethics into the workplace: abdication and activism. These orientations are supported by managerial practice such as reproductive and coping tactics (abdication) and covert and overt tactics (activism); and, three enabling conditions of activist practice: empowerment and psychological safety, moral shock, and morality praxis. While our findings illustrate the tremendous challenges managers face when attempting to influence organizational practices towards their ethical and environmental aspirations, we also show that under specific conditions, individual managers can become fully engaged advocates and drivers of positive change from the inside. In so doing, our individual-level analysis of intrapreneurship provides a more complex picture of the possibilities for positive change than have been previously put forth by mainstream and critical CSR research.

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Notes

  1. http://www.cgdev.org/article/unilever-ceo-paul-polman-wins-commitment-development-award-global-leadership-efforts-reduce.

  2. We use the terms ‘social intrapreneurs’ and ‘activists’ interchangeably. While the term ‘social intrapreneurs’ is gaining academic momentum, a number of study informants used the in vivo term ‘activists’ to describe their own practices and managerial approach.

  3. Aligned with the strategy-as-practice approach, we define practice to encapsulate the activities of actors/practitioners (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007). Thus, we use the terms action, interaction, behavior, activity, tactic and practice throughout to represent the various forms of managerial practice—"what managers do” (Johnson et al. 2003, p. 15). Three of the four categories of practice identified in our analysis are specifically termed ‘tactics’ to reflect the individual-level strategic motives underpinning these forms of managerial practice.

  4. In this study, we use the terminology micro-level to refer to individual/managerial level practice, meso-level to refer to team and organization level practice, and macro-level to refer to societal level practice external to the organisation (see: Dopfer et al. 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Michal Carrington & Benjamin Neville

  2. Schulich Business School, York University, Toronto, Canada

    Detlev Zwick

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  1. Michal Carrington
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Correspondence to Michal Carrington.

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Michal Carrington declares that she has no conflict of interest. Benjamin Neville is a section co-editor for the ‘Corporate Responsibility: Theoretical/Qualitative Issues’ section in the Journal of Business Ethics. Detlev Zwick declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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Editors at the Journal of Business Ethics are recused from all decisions relating to submissions with which there is any identified potential conflict of interest. Submissions to the Journal of Business Ethics from editors of the journal are handled by a senior independent editor at the journal and subject to full double blind peer review processes.

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Carrington, M., Zwick, D. & Neville, B. Activism and Abdication on the Inside: The Effect of Everyday Practice on Corporate Responsibility. J Bus Ethics 160, 973–999 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3814-5

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