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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes a critical look at the ways in which, in response to external pressures and demands, resource extraction companies use the instruments of CSR to create a particular kind of business mythology and a corporate world in which they are able to claim "good corporate citizenship".
Paper long abstract:
The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) forces companies to acknowledge their external impacts and to recognise their duty to account for these. However, despite a great wealth of analyses on the topic, little about CSR remains uncontested. The concept has been widely critiqued as a powerful means of self-regulation that both avoids external controls and simply measures its own measurements, with academics and practitioners pointing to 'a gap between the stated intentions of business leaders and their actual behaviour and impact in the real world' (Frynas, 2005).
This paper looks at ways in which resource extraction companies use the instruments of CSR to create for themselves a corporate world in which they are able legitimize extraction and claim "good corporate citizenship". It presents CSR as an intrinsically relational concept and argues that companies use carefully structured stories and measurements of the extent and the quality of their relations to strategically manage the ways in which they acknowledge and act on their economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic social responsibilities. Looking at the Frieda River Project in PNG, the paper argues that this corporate re-invention is enabled by a socio-political exercise in creating labels and indicators and a particular form of business mythology which shares certain characteristics with Melanesian tumbuna stories. It shows that, at Frieda, the widely conceived sustainability performance of the company developing the project is continuously assessed and re-assessed not against technocratic indicators, but on the basis of quality and efficacy relations which it facilitates and mobilises.
Legitimate extraction? Exploring the actors and institutions that enable extractive industries
Session 1 Friday 15 December, 2017, -