CLIC Speaker Abstracts

John M. Conley (University of North Carolina School of Law): " The Emerging Discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility " June 5, 2005, 5pm. Haines 332.

I have recently been engaged in an ethnographic project (with University of Illinois law professor Cynthia Williams) that focuses on corporations, non-governmental organizations, and other participants in the burgeoning worldwide corporate social responsibility movement. The three essential CSR activities are partnerships between corporations and NGOs (as, for example, to promote environmentally friendly agriculture), dialogs between corporations and their "stakeholders" (workers, residents of affected communities, NGOs, and others), and corporate reporting of social and environmental performance. Since two of the three activities consist entirely of language, the CSR arena is emerging as a linguistic domain of enormous theoretical interest and practical significance. The practical significance derives from the fact that the CSR movement is an exercise in what political scientists call "the new governance." This is an increasingly influential theory of regulation characterized by a weakening of top-down governmental control in favor of the diffusion of rights and responsibilities among national governments, international bodies, private companies, NGOs, and other interested parties.

In this presentation I will discuss some of the linguistic issues that we have identified after an initial round of interviewing CSR activists in corporations, NGOs, and the investment world; participating in and observing CSR events; and analyzing corporate CSR reports. The ultimate question is whether the new corporate behaviors demanded by CSR advocates will amount to substantive change or will prove to be merely another opportunity for corporate public relations. The linguistic sophistication that corporations are bringing to bear in shaping and managing CSR discourse gives cause for concern. I conclude that this topic, beyond its inherent academic interest, presents an unusual opportunity for anthropologists and linguists to bring depth and clarity to an emotional public issue.