How Can CSR Link to Both Social Justice and Sustainable Development?

“Active inclusion means enabling every citizen, notably the most disadvantaged, to fully participate in society, including having a job”. This definition by the EU Commission underlines that employment and social integration are indisociable (Durkheim), but cannot resist the excesses of liberalism (Keynes). As Sen –or others in different ways– have argued, the relationship between economics and development can only be understood through the ethics and moral values it promotes and defends. In order to discover under what conditions such conceptions of justice arise, one further line of questioning needs adding regarding empowerment, a concept even the Commission’s recognizes as linking inclusion and citizenship. It is thus imperative to reconsider the interactions between economic democracy and political democracy –more precisely between different modes of democratization. In this paper, the ethical question of ‘equality at work’ will therefore be framed as part of current moves to redefine the ‘nature’ of the firm, here through employment norms: their hiring practices, but also rules and practices regarding remuneration, promotion, positions and above all the power to govern.

In practice, company managers increasingly argue for Corporate Social Responsability to include ‘all stakeholders’ while demanding reductions in their social obligations (working time, employee representative bodies, etc.). Meanwhile, the externalization and multinationalization of business activities make the impact of the law and employee organisations less direct, and this while reshaping the relationship between the state and the business world (public-private partnerships, changes in the hierarchy of regulatory rules, development of soft law, etc.). Ethical and practical debates over CSR are thus a good analyser of the contemporary redistribution of legal-political regulation within economic activity.

Hence rethinking the firm as a scale of regulation is at the heart of our problematic. Combining pluridisciplinary skills (notably from law, economics, sociology, business studies and politics), this paper will set out an analytical framework that characterizes:

1)        how each firm’s logics of action (as symbolic systems) structure its operational priorities and management practices regarding its commitments to social inclusiveness at work, including how its government ‘performs’ ethics and power;

2)        the impact of CSR practices and status-linked rules upon change over time in these logics of action and their instrumentation.

The overall aim is to grasp how each mode of CSR implementation leads to ‘qualifying’ each company government in terms of its capacity to actively contribute to social inclusion, and hence to regulating the conduct of power within the ‘sphere of influence’ of the firm (ISO26000).

The originality of our framework concerns its better integration of fields of research that have yet to be well connected (industrial economics and theories of CSR, public action, law and politics within the firm) to analyze ‘innovations’ (eg CSR or social business) around long-term issues. This provides a road map for our next step (already under way) which is to deploy empirical research which compares the effects of legal status, sectorial institutions and CSR practices upon the quality of social recognition at the workplace and the ability to socially integrate through work.

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