Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the tension between the concepts of 'responsibility' and 'sustainability' in the realm of the corporate discourses and practices referred to as 'corporate social responsibility' or 'CR'.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on interviews conducted with executives in the corporate responsibility or CR arena in Ireland, this paper will highlight their very particular account of the history of 'corporate responsibility' and how they considered using instead a different phrase—'sustainability'. Reflecting a tension evident to others in CR circles in Ireland, both terms encapsulated different relationships to time and sentiment.

According to these interviews, sustainability captured how the dread of the future was investing the present, under the control of the most worldly of all—companies and citizens—with the power, the determination, to control the future now. Identifiable with a "strategically deployable shifter" (Kirsch 2010; Urciuoli 2003) the word was also becoming a 'carrier' for (physical environmental) ecological thinking, redeployed to embrace a wider ecology of social, environmental and economic concerns—zoēpolitics becoming biopolitics with heavy ethical emphasis.

In contrast, 'responsibility' was either too sacred—its use by companies "demeaned" it—or too oriented to pessimism and to critiques for corporate actions already taken, in short, to conscience.

According to these corporate responsibility practitioners, the encouragement to 'be responsible' had less of a chance of motivating companies to change fundamentally than sustainability did. Not all executives focussed on the terminology. Nonetheless, among certain advocates for corporate change the tension between the two terms is still not resolved; one leading advocacy organisation now refers to their work as providing guidance on responsible and sustainable business practices.