A greener potemkin village? Corporate social responsibility and the limits of growth

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 79-90

  Enoch, Simon ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CORPORATE STRATEGY; DEGRADATION; IDEOLOGY; NEOLIBERALISM;

EID: 34249301776     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: 15483290     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455750701366485     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Stevenson Swanson, "Lack of Trust in Business Lingers," Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2003.
2. Pat Argenti, Corporate Communication (New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin, 2003), pp. 3-4.
3. Claudia Deutsch, "New Surveys Show That Big Business Has a P.R. Problem, The New York Times December 9, 2005.
4. James Hamilton, "Media Coverage of Corporate Social Responsibility, The Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy Working Paper Series, 2003, p. 6.
5. Graham Knight & Josh Greenberg, "Events, Issues, and Social Responsibility: The Shifting Terrain of Corporate PR," paper presented at Global Media Conference, Spokane, WA, July 2002, p. 4.
6. For a cross-section of these differing viewpoints see Tom Bateman, "Thinking About Corporate Social Responsibility," Integra Ventures, April 2003, available online at: http://www.iintegra.infotech.sk;
7. Eveline Lubbers, (ed.), Battling Big Business: Countering Greenwash, Infiltration and Other Forms of Corporate Bullying (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2002)
8. and Jem Bendell, (ed.), Terms for Endearment: Business, NGOs and Sustainable Development (Sheffield, U.K: Greenleaf Publishing, 2000).
9. For an example, see Steven Hayward, "The New Corporate Balance Sheet: Black, Red and Green," AEI Environmental Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, October 2002.
10. John Roberts, "The Manufacture of Corporate Social Responsibility: Constructing Corporate Sensibility," Organization, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2003, p. 250.
11. Marjorie Kelly, "Building Economic Democracy," Business Ethics, August 15, 2002.
12. Michael Goldman, "The World Bank and the Making of Green Neoliberalism," paper presented at the Capitalism Nature Socialism Anniversary Conference, York University, Toronto, July 23, 2005.
13. WBCSD Corporate Responsibility Overview, online at: http://www.wbcsd.ch.
14. Hamilton, 2003, op. cit., p. 3.
15. Ibid., p. 3.
16. Jem Bendell, "Working with Stakeholder Pressure for Sustainable Development," in Jem Bendell, 2000, op. cit., p. 16.
17. Paul Ekins, cited in Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 75.
18. Martin O'Connor deems this the "ecological phase of capitalism," where nature is rendered internal to capital and subordinated to "the rational calculus of production and exchange." See Martin O'Connor, "On the Misadventures of Capitalist Nature," in Martin O'Connor (ed.), Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), pp. 126-131.
19. John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 37.
20. Ibid., p. 80.
21. James O'Connor, "Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?" in Martin O'Connor, 1994, op. cit., p. 153.
22. Those who would seek assurance in recycling as a panacea would be wise to consider Herman Daly's argument that for those products that can be recycled, the process not only uses up irreplaceable energy, but that recycling can also never be 100 percent complete. Some fraction will always escape the process. See Toby Smith, The Myth of Green Marketing: Tending our Goats at the Edge of Apocalypse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 77-78.
23. William E. Rees, "n Ecological Economics Perspective on Sustainability and Prospects for Ending Poverty, Population and Environment, Vol. 24, No. 1, September 2002, p. 17.
24. D. Meadows, et al, Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future (London: Earthscan, 1992), p. 168.
25. Meadows, cited in Dobson, 2001, op. cit., pp. 64-65.
26. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London: Zed Books, 2002), p. 157.
27. Elmar Altvater, "Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space," in O'Connor, 1994, op. cit., p. 88.
28. Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 39.
29. Ibid., p. 43.
30. James O'Connor, "On Capitalist Accumulation and Economic and Ecological Crisis," in James O'Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), p. 180.
31. Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 43.
32. Bellamy Foster, 2002, op. cit., p. 45.
33. Ibid., p. 46.
34. John Stauber & Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 75.
35. Ariel Salleh, "Nature, Woman, Labor, Capital: Living the Deepest Contradictions," in O'Connor (ed.), 1994, op. cit., p. 120.
36. Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 160-162.
37. Bateman, 2003, op. cit., pp. 5-6.
38. Cheryl Rodgers, "Making it Legit: New Ways of Generating Corporate Legitimacy in a Globalizing World," in Bendell (ed.), 2002, op. cit. p. 43.
39. Chris Marsden, "the New Corporate Citizenship of Big Business: Part of the Solution to Sustainability?" Business and Society Review, Vol. 105, No. 1, 2000, p. 10.
40. Clare Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter, Private Authority and International Affairs (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 3-5.
41. Simon Zadek, The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship (London: Earthscan Publishing, 2001), p. 47.
42. Andy Rowell, "the Spread of Greenwash," in Lubbers, 2002, op. cit. p. 23.
43. Ibid., p. 25.
44. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
45. This is not to indict all corporations of the same malign intent as Chevron. However, given the irreconcilability of capitalism and sustainable development, the effect of these partnerships will be to legitimate destructive corporate actions in the eyes of the public, irrespective of intentions of good faith on the part of the participants.
46. Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 154.
47. J. O'Connor, 1994, op. cit., p. 162.
48. Ibid., p. 162.
49. Kovel, 2002, op. cit., p. 24.
50. Timothy Luke, "The System of Sustainable Degradation," paper presented at the Capitalism Nature Socialism Anniversary Conference, York University, Toronto, July 24, 2005.
51. Ralph Hamann and Nicola Acutt, "How Should Civil Society (and the government) Respond to Corporate Social Responsibility? A Critique of Business Motivations and the Potential for Partnerships," Development Southern Africa, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2003, p. 259.
52. Kovel, 2002., 154.
53. Ewa Charkiewicz, "Corporations, the UN and Neoliberal Bio-politics," Development, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2005, p. 80.
54. Smith, 1998, op. cit., p. 6.
55. Ibid., p. 6.