The New Political Role of Business in a Globalized World – A Review of a New Perspective on CSR and its Implications for the Firm, Governance, and Democracy

By Andreas Georg Scherer, Guido Palazzo. 2011

1,931 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Scholars in management and economics widely share the assumption that business firms focus on profits only, while it is the task of the state system to provide public goods. In this view business firms are conceived of as economic actors, and governments and their state agencies are considered the only political actors. We suggest that, under the conditions of globalization, the strict division of labour between private business and nation-state governance does not hold any more. Many business firms have started to assume social and political responsibilities that go beyond legal requirements and fill the regulatory vacuum in global governance. Our review of the literature shows that there are a growing number of publications from various disciplines that propose a politicized concept of corporate social responsibility. We consider the implications of this new perspective for theorizing about the business firm, governance, and democracy.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f767a9aee8734f8c5c0459c0816bf4b3587ae996

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Citations in the corpus

Toward a theory of business (2015, background): “Calling attention to fundamental changes in the world of business and the corporation’s changing role in that changing world, Scherer and Palazzo (2007, 2011) would likely agree.”
COVID‐19 and the Future of CSR Research (2020, background): “One could argue therefore that, going forward, the instrumental version of CSR that dominated management scholarship is largely unfit for purpose (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011), or even dead (Fleming and Jones, 2012).”
Exploring environmental, social, and governance disclosure effects on the S&P 500 financial performance (2019, background): “Legitimacy theory posits that ESG activities represent the intent of the firm to represent a moral claim to the social contract (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2011).”
Responsible Innovation and the Innovation of Responsibility: Governing Sustainable Development in a Globalized World (2015, positive): “(Owen et al. 2013b, p. 33) In this regard, soft law, which ‘‘operates without a governmental power to enforce rules and to sanction deviant behavior’’ (Scherer and Palazzo 2011, p. 907), can serve as a complementary means of facilitating innovations that do not harm society and the environment.”
Entrepreneurship Amid Concurrent Institutional Constraints in Less Developed Countries (2016, background): “Thus, in departing from the views seen and roles occupied by MNEs (Luo, 2010; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011), the authors redress the concept of voids and conceptualize the role of the institutional environment given the constraints posed to formal and informal institutions, such as those found in the…”
The emergence of Southern standards in agricultural value chains: A new trend in sustainability governance? (2015, background): “Scherer and Palazzo (2011) add that organizations may actively”
Benefit Corporation Legislation and the Emergence of a Social Hybrid Category (2015, background): “A well-established debate about the role of business in addressing social issues continues to play out in political campaigns and at the ballot box.(27) Creation of a new social hybrid category that explicitly includes some properties that are contested in existing for-profit business provides an al”
Transnational power and translocal governance: The politics of corporate responsibility (2018, background): “Instead, I point readers to several comprehensive reviews of the field (see e.g. Aguinis and Glavas, 2012; Kolk, 2016; Scherer and Palazzo, 2011).”
Corporate Social Responsibility: Perspectives on the CSR Construct’s Development and Future (2021, background): “In response, the distinction between explicit CSR and implicit CSR as posited by Matten and Moon (2008), the notion of political CSR (pCSR) (Scherer & Palazzo, 2011), and the application of CSR in developing countries (Jamali et al., 2017), were presented.”