Keywords

3.1 Introduction

Corporate Social Responsibility is more or less close to an oxymoron: the social in its proper sense is more or less closely linked to some form of public: While the exact profile may vary, the social is inherently a matter of relationality, going beyond pure interaction between two or more individuals that are independent from each other. On the other hand, a corporation is, at its very core, nothing else than an individual entity, a legal body that acts, by and large, in a comparable way as a natural entity and interacts with other legal or natural entities. On the one hand, CSR is very much the continuation of the old pattern of the patron taking care of the workforce, not least as means of integrating some of the workforce—this concerned securing specific qualification and establishing some degree of attachment to the company. As far as one accepts this, it means accepting as well a twofold limitation:

  • We see an introverted system, directed to measures for the employees—we see already a reduced understanding of social, interpreted as due diligence of the employer towards the individual employees. What sometimes is interpreted as early form of CSR (see e.g. Carroll 2008), is in the actual fact more the form of a hierarchical and somewhat paternalistic relationship, entirely based on a top-down approach to governing and guiding.

  • Another aspect has to be seen in the fact of a differentiated approach—any “social action”—in the widest meaning understood here as a benevolent one—was a more or less clearly defined measure, undertaken by one, namely the entrepreneur, directed to many, namely a selected number of individuals.

Such characterisation is meaningful, as it allows one to mark in a nutshell the corporate social responsibility as a structurally different concept:

  • While labour-force-oriented policies surely continue to play a role, the substance of the activities changed and they are also complemented by an external orientation;

  • While sometimes classified as PR,Footnote 1 CSR is now defined by establishing a multiple relationship between three participants: the corporation as principal, the worker as main executive actor, and society at large as an additional point of reference—in today’s parlance one may speak of stakeholders.

Importantly, the main executive actor is now not only seen as part of a closed productive system, but also as a social being. This means in the given context that his or her productivity depends on how he or she is socially embedded. Finally, outcome remains of course measured in return on investment, the latter meaning that the definition of social responsibility remains tied to generating profit.Footnote 2

Nowadays we may speak about a move from CSR as multiple relationship to a complex relationality—however, there are at least two trends, which will be guiding the following. The one may be called arbitrary responsibility as replacing statutory order; the other an emergence of a new responsibility mix.

3.2 New Trends in CSR or New Conditions of Production?—Some Reflections on the Foundations of Shifts in Management Strategies

It may seem like a paradox that CSR is at least in Europe a more or less recent topic on the main agenda of entrepreneurial development, while we witness at the very same time already a shift away from the known patterns of CSR establishing new forms, or to be more precise: a new and double-edged approach to social activities. In the following this will be briefly explored. Not least, it is seen (a) as consequence of a major shift of the structure of wealth and (b) as matter of a change of the role of the corporation itself.—It has to be emphasised that this is a hugely relevant trend, while at the very same time it should not be misinterpreted as dominant in the understanding of replacing the still prevailing entrepreneurial patterns. At the centre of the following reflections, the new digital and so-called sharing- and gig-economies can be found.

  1. (a)

    The New Rich

While there seems to be some bewilderment when we read today reports about the new rich, two aspects are frequently overlooked. First, such surges are recurrent, part of long waves of economic development. Speaking of long waves, one is not directly referring to the Kondratieff analysis of long cycles of development (e.g. Kondratiev 1926; Šmihula 2011). A more general perspective is suggested, not least one that is closely linked to a generational shift. The reader is reminded of Kenneth Lamott’s work from 1969, looking at The Moneymakers or the Great Big New Rich in America (Lamott 1969) as one example for a large number of publications dealing during those years not only in the USA with a “new generation of business leaders”. This is linked to the second factor, namely that we also find a new generation of enterprise, or better said: enterprising spirit.—Such statement needs to be qualified: those changes are complex and at the same time very simple. They are complex as different factors are involved: simple generational detachments and conflicts including psychological factors, national patterns and economic and technological aspects, to name but a few. Still, the major aspect is the redefinition of the conditions under which profit is generated. Again, this is also a complex field in itself, determined amongst others by the point in the business cycle and individually available resources. Turning this economically, we are looking in particular at the position of entrepreneurial activities in the tension between over-accumulation and devaluation (see Boccara 2013, 2015), being dealt with by individuals depending on personality and available assets.

Looking at the latter, we see effectively a debasement of economic activities. As correct as it is to speak of financialisation, as important is it to emphasise that financialisation is not simply an expression of a monetary surplus. In the actual fact financialisation is—at least at its “developed stage”—a way of debasing finance even from monetary forms (see Sassen 2014, 2016). Taking the words from Saskia Sassen’s book ‘Expulsion’, we learn about finance as a capability, though one with variable valence; …. Finance needs to be distinguished from traditional banking. Traditional banks sell money in their possession. Financial firms sell something they do not have, and therein lies the push to be far more innovative and invasive than traditional banking. In this regard, finance can be thought of as a capability to securitize just about everything in an economy and, in doing so, subordinate economies and governments to its own criteria for measuring success (Sassen 2014, p. 118).

To briefly mention, it aims to highlight that today’s wealth is to a large extent not real, not linked to traditional processes of material production. The actual over-production of material goods and the fact that the calculation of GDP includes societal ‘bads’ (as for instance negative environmental effects of production and the need to ‘repair’) are, in this light, only the tip of the iceberg. Leaving this aside, we are witnessing an increasing meaning of immaterial production (see e.g. Lévy and Jouyet 2006), making the determination of value and accounting extremely difficult, in particular requiring a reformulation of the labour theory of value. This is due to the fact that we are now dealing in several areas with labour processes that are in different ways socialised:

  • On the one hand we find them more or less extremely individualised, often also modularised and miniaturised;

  • On the other hand, however, the connection and dependency between the single acts is much closer, going beyond the coordination and re-assembly of traditional patterns of division of labour—as networked processes dependencies are seemingly technically determined, while they are actually defined by specific business strategies and market power.

Furthermore, it is also more difficult to determine a social average of the time needed for the production. This applies to all work that is highly networked, and depends to a large degree on creativity.

In addition, we see in connection with these developments a re-foundation of processes of generating value. In concrete terms, the development of time, and even more so location, gain a new meaning: the reverse of delimitation (see e.g. the contributions in Industrielle Beziehungen 2016) is the extension of control, reaching out and encapsulating in the extreme case the entire life and living. Another factor is the so-called prosumer-work and life culture, which will be addressed in more detail at a later stage.

An important aspect is, in consequence, that the traditional firm with its socio-economic function (Coase 1937) loses in this form its position and undergoes even a process of dissolution.

  1. (b)

    The Corporation as Market

As far as we are dealing with major industries in the making,Footnote 3 we can speak of a treble-I-complex: information, informalisation, and immaterialisation.Footnote 4 This is closely linked to another dimension, which is here presented as treble-M-process, reflecting modularisation, miniaturisation, and further marketisation.Footnote 5 Nevertheless, what appears to be a set of factors resulting in the dissolution of the previously existing unities is in reality a major push of socialisation. This is not least due to the fact that the 3-I/3-M-development is inherently characterised by a complete loss of meaning in isolated individual acts. At first glance, there is some parallel to the process of traditional industrialisation, which had also been characterised by establishing and increasing direct dependency in form of division of labour: a specific task had been assigned to every worker, and it had to be executed at a specific time and in a specific location. Today, these specifications are in several jobs obsolete, the final product is about an outcome of not arbitrary but at least variable combinations of activities and includes the combination across times and spaces. This requires—and bears as consequence—that many of the products are, in actual fact, not clearly defined. Instead, they are a matter of functions (“mobility instead of cars”), frequently offering “spaces for unfolding life” and “lifestyles”Footnote 6 which are at least on the level of appearance dominant, degrading the actual products to a seemingly secondary issue.—In several respects, the new generation of Apple Stores are an outstanding example for this. The introduction of the new concept actually looks quite exciting—a short depiction suggesting:

In 100 of its biggest stores, like the San Francisco flagship, Apple’s “hardware” update means new screens and spaces for meetings and classes. The Genius Bar, now lined with trees, becomes the Genius Grove., there’s a several- dimensions approach to the Genius: new staffers specialized in music and photography called “Creative Pros”. (CBS News 2017; see as well Kuchler 2016)

In particular, four points are virulent:

  • The presentation is about space and life style, not products: one may say Apple is suggesting itself as community opening its doors, providing a space that allows other communities to develop—in other words, Apple wants to be seen as “super-community” and facilitator of community development.

  • Though “usability” is of course also a matter that has something to do with an utilitarian business orientation, on the level of appearance it is about play and fail and hail, being always open to welcoming something new—the focus is the making, interestingly enough keeping the business-option separate, as a kind of premium service.

  • The latter point is of some general interest, as the new, and supposedly low, price economy (see e.g. Anderson 2009: Friedman 2005) is not least one that is hugely differentiated (Freeland 2012) and works with “hidden costs” and externalities.

  • While the presentation is explicitly international and global, there is a reverse parallel: software instead of hardware, open global communities instead of defending national properties is what we see; what we get looks different: global exploitation of the hardware producers, off-shoring, gig- und sharing economies going hand in hand with precarity and impoverishment as the irresponsible business part.

While this has obviously repercussions on the level of individual activities—and the activities of individuals—as the bottom layer of the process of generating value, it has as well consequences for the organisation of this process, i.e. the understanding of the firm and enterprise respectively. With this re-foundation and re-location of processes of generating value, we are witnessing a redefinition of major players that turn into quasi-independent actors in a value-and-poverty network. The term value-network is used as variation and extension of the term value-chain. As such, it offers an understanding of a complex field of relations, and its imbalances: the different strengths of the individual connecting lines and knots, the varying amount of dependencies, and the finally bearing strings. Actually, it means as well that such value-nets allow including conceptually poverty chains (see on the latter Selwyn 2016, 2017). Perhaps more appropriate would it be to speak of value and poverty networks as multilayer settings:

  • The first layer is concerned with the different investments;

  • A second layer is presenting the gains;

  • Third we find a layer that allows balancing investment and gains;

  • A fourth layer, finally, aims at comparing the ratios, thus allowing us to determine the value-and-poverty-chains of the entire process, i.e. the relative and absolute losers.

In part due to this analysis, we can see a generational shift in form of the emergence of a new generation, to be more precise: The New Money-makers. And, to be even more precise, it is about The New Croupiers. Some data for the Unites States of America provide an impression:

In fact, scholars estimate that these younger Americans stand to inherit more than $40 trillion in wealth and create trillions more in their lifetimes. Much of that will be designated for charitable giving, according to nextgendonors.org. With the potential for unprecedented resources and more diverse ways than ever to engage in charitable giving, many expect the next generation of major philanthropists – those who fit into “Gen X” (born 1964–1980) or “Gen Y” (born 1981–2000) – to transform the charitable giving itself. (Northwestern MutualVoice 2014)

Against the earlier background, we do not address primarily an inconceivable amount of money, approaching dimensions of some surreal appearance and surely surmounting many state budgets. At least equally important is the fact that it is often enough difficult to find its real origin clearly: the resources seem to be there—undeserved and unearned. We see two socio-psychological dimensions behind the move to charitability. The one is about the search for some form of “staying in business”. With all qualifications, necessary because of the generalisation, members of this generation are representing “new” attitudes and lifestyles as much as they are caught in the traditions of some socio-paternalism of the Judaeo-Christian understanding of the world we are living in. This merges—potentially—with the fundamental requirement of capitalist business that money has to take some “productive form”, even if it is that of contributing to the social good.Footnote 7

The other dimension is linked to, perhaps even derived from, it: as much as we are concerned with the search for meaning in a world of excessive affluence, we see a merger with “visionary attitudes” that are presenting themselves as merger of personalised—and personalist—power, technological producibility and an emerging paradigm of solutionism:

The focus is the term activity and the numerous linked dynamics of erosion between work and life, personal and professional knowledge, serious and playful activity. (Nachtwey and Seidl 2017, p. 14)

This “blend of libertarianism and technological determinism” (ibid.: 22) is “not interested in what is, but in what is possible” (ibid., p. 24), accepting the price of failure (see in this context also Morozov 2013). In this way, it is surely also about retrieving some critical attitudes-makers of the youth movements of the seventies and eighties.

Here—as in the cases of the bottom end of this new formation: the precariously employed, “gig workers”, “sharing-providers” etc.—we find also blurring borders between business and non-business, labour and leisure, dependency and self-determination. In other words, we are witnessing very much of the interlocking of a change of accumulation regime, living regime, mode of regulation and mode of life, as they are defined in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Theory of regulation
Full size table

These four dimensions are actually very much—indirectly or directly—points of reference for CSR-activities.

Having already said that all this is a matter of socialisation, can now be specified: the network is characterised by a huge ambiguity: on the one hand, distinct from the guard net, it is a net that provides different options, is even contingent, and depending in its contingency on the choice of the actor[s]. In this sense, such net is a security field, subject to variable design. On the other hand, such net has strong and weak crossings and strong and weak nodes. Arbitrariness and contingency are in this way not only relative but depending on specifically defined power positions and the available access points—in this way this pattern is strongly contradicting the more technicist and neutralist view presented by Manuel Castells (see e.g. Castells 2010).

3.3 New Patterns …

The foregoing is necessary to understand CSR today in a new way, and getting aware of the actual meaning of the changes we witness—including the surge of philanthropic benevolence, even elevated as issue for global investment, shareholders and the political agenda (see e.g. Sorkin 2018; Fink 2018; Rosenstein and Sheehan 2018; Kosoff 2017). Thus, there is much hype, while point of departure is not a positive definition of what such responsibility is about—leaving aside that Fink speaks of the need for a long-term orientation. Instead we find a negative definition, based on the fact of (1) in part criticised excessive resources, (2) the obvious fragile reputation and (3) a shift of the products themselves towards inherently socio-public goods.—We may and many do contest the good of the goods and see them as evil—there is increasing pressure and internal critique; investors beginning to “Press Apple to Act on Children’s Use”; we find “a creator of the iPhone [who] called the device ‘addictive’”; while “An early Facebook investor raised questions about the social network’s impact on children’s brain” (Gelles 2018). However, there is little doubt that large parts of the tech-industries can be characterised as public utilities and providers of public utilities respectively, paradoxically controlling larger resources then states, more powerful in a global system in which democratic government is replaced by stakeholderFootnote 8 governance, aloof from any national or sectoral limitation. However, they are still caught in the contradiction of the treble-I (information, informalisation, and immaterialisation) and treble-M (modularisation, miniaturisation, and increasing marketisation) patterns of re-production. This is a setting where politicians claim to be “manager and carer”,Footnote 9 while CSO present themselves openly as politicians and political activists respectively.

The debate on Corporate Social Responsibility gains a completely new dimension, now actually being a disguise for what Milton Friedman famously presented as ultimate social responsibility of the corporation, contending

[t]he view has been gaining widespread acceptance that corporate officials and labor leaders have a “social responsibility” that goes beyond serving the interest of their stockholders or their members. This view shows a fundamental misconception of the character and nature of a free economy. In such an economy, there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud. Similarly, the “social responsibility” of labor leaders is to serve the interests of the members of their unions. It is the responsibility of the rest of us to establish a framework of law such that an individual in pursuing his own interest …. (Friedman 1962, p. 133)

What we see is a highly open, emancipative and integrative culture, even playful and seemingly non-utilitarian: “everything is about the way, moving on”.Footnote 10 Referring to this impression, we face a shift of the economic and the legal pillars of societies:

  • Economically we are witnessing a new stage of prosumerism—originally Alvin Toffler introduced this interpretation in the 1980s, contending that “[i]n short, whether we look at self-help movements, do-it-yourself trends, or new production technologies, we find the same shift toward a much closer involvement of the consumer in production. In such a world, conventional distinctions between producer and consumer vanish. The ‘outsider’ becomes an ‘insider,’ and even more production is shifted from Sector B of the economy to Sector A where the pro-sumer reigns”Footnote 11 (Toffler 1980, p. 292). The more recent development is, at least for the industries in question, characterised by another shift: while we see initially two departments—department I, producing means of production, and department II, producing means for consumption. We witness now a further development, with the emergence of department III—finances—and department IV—‘independent’ services (see e.g. Herrmann 2014a, b; Herrmann and Frangakis 2014, in: Dymarski, Frangakis, Leaman, 2014).

    – What sociologists call patchwork biography, is consequence and cause of a sector of modularised economic activities.

  • Legally we are witnessing a massive surge of socialisation, however by and large caught in the fetters of private appropriation. Part of the economic-legal problem is the network effect, which is legally better understood as concentralisation: this term is suggested to capture a process of clustering control that reached an immediate penetration of public spaces. Thus socialisation as we see today is not only marked by its major “quantitative surge”, for instance indicated by the fact that everything is just a mouse-click away. It is also characterised by a qualitative move: moving directly in public spaces, generating and extracting data for the immediate or laterFootnote 12 use, allows as well a more complex dependency on and access of publicness. Complexity is understood as a qualitative matter, i.e. a hugely increased variability.

The other way around, we see the loss of clearly defined and definable formal frameworks within which relations can be regulated and controlled, simply due to the fact private actors are occupying public spaces. In particular, we are facing:

  • The withering away of the firm in its traditional understanding

  • The diffusion and contraction of production, marketisation and consumption in one public space

  • The diffusion and contraction of production, marketisation and consumption in global value and poverty networks (“loss of national sovereignty” and “loss of state sovereignty”)

  • The tendency towards prosumption

    • As accumulation by dispossession

    • As development of creative spaces.

Concentralisation means as well that we face a more or less expanded network of small independent workers, freelancers and the like for whom the term flexicurity has little relevance,Footnote 13 being substituted by riskponsibility, i.e. the risk and responsibility for the results, to be taken by the individual actors.

The issue of occupying public spaces is a multiple one as such—it emerges as problem if (a) the private actors are (quasi-) monopolists, and (b) if they are with this (quasi-) monopolist power determining the use of such public spaces in their private interest. – What sociologists call postmodernisms, can now be interpreted in legal terms as paradox of private regulation of the public realm.

Revisiting Milton Friedman’s argument, we are now at a point that where we see some kind of ‘one-sided merger’. As presented, he points to three dimensions:

  • The responsibility of business … to increase its profits

  • The “social responsibility” of labour leaders … to serve the interests of the members of their unions

  • The responsibility of the rest of us to establish a framework of law.

The problem for CSR is that Friedman’s proclamation is overturned by the reality insofar “business”, “labour leaders” and “the rest of us” merged on “market places of prosumption”. Decisively this happens under the terms and conditions of business, namely of the big business of big data comptrollers. As much as this is a matter of some key players, the actual feature is a quite different one. It can be understood as penetration of society by specifically defined algorithms, guided by solutionism as a supposedly value-neutral paradigm.

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The big target here isn’t advertising, though. It’s science. (Anderson 2008)

The interwoven treble-I and treble-M patterns are suggesting a well-informed, small-scale frame of and for direct interaction with the world. The fact is the opposite: the uncontrolled control of public spaces and their redefinition in private interests that fundamentally change the terms and conditions of existing social contracts (Berners-Lee 2018).Footnote 14

Returning to the supposedly neutral solutionism, some questions remain to be asked, allowing us to better understand the problematique of CSR today. Leaning meaningfully against the title of Lisa Gitelman’s book which suggests that “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (Gitelman 2013), the present concluding statement is that Raw Public Space is an Oxymoron. While the traditional CSR has been and is by and large a—welcomed or criticised—supplement and claimed complement of business and statutory politics and policies, CSR is today a clandestine redefinition of business, suggesting to re-humanise technical solutionism. Instead of fulfilling statutory duties, reducing the burden on public budgets and pursuing own values and goals, CSR is now taking over statutory functions, directly defining the entire public sphere and politics—business leaders play a role but it is corporations and the corporate-solutionist spirit that escapes in algorithmic wafts of mist. In this light, the freedom of “one-person-enterprises”, “entrepreneurial freelancers of Schumpeterian spirit”, the supposed custom tailoring by zero-hour-contracts and so forth are of special importance—actors also moving on the public stage of big data, while accessibility and control are limited by certain allowances. They may be comparable with gig-artists and groupies that populated the music scene of the 1960s. In other words, parts of a still emerging new economy are performing in spaces and ways that in fact undermine the conditions for CSR. Instead of searching for ways to develop CSR as part of a “mixed welfare system”, concatenating certain elements with securitised rights, it establishes itself in two ways:

  1. (i)

    The one is the penetration of public spaces as agenda-setter, and in many cases actually undermining the public within the public. Filter Bubbles (see Pariser 2011) are not limited on closing political spaces and discourses. It is equally a mechanism that serves as foundation and frame for a certain living regime:

    • That of solutionism and a neo-feudalist vista on the meaning of social responsibility.

    • Being aware of major challenges and problems, this new generation did not develop a sense for the origin of money as means of making a living; thus it is difficult for them to understand that money is not simply a means to cover existential and luxurious needs but also a means of basing oneself in a money-led society.

    • This is a mirror of a disembodied economy that had been mentioned earlier: capital is not simply money, and in the course of a globally developed economy today, finance is not about money or capital—instead it is an abstract operand.

    • Social issues are defined in a similar way: life and living, and social relationships as part of it, are defined as a kind of abstract operand. The latter is the framework that establishes itself as rule of many activities we undertake, although we claim that they contradict our personal attitudes.

    • Of course, we have to ask ourselves if this is only a technology-bound reformulation of an issue that seems to be a general problem of humankind.

    • This is what we may conclude when remembering the passage from Seneca’s reflections on Saving Time:

    Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca 65 AD, p. 3)

  2. (ii)

    To some extent we find another way, reminding us of the dualism that Adam Smith established by positioning the Wealth of Nations and the Moral Sentiments as two paradigms side by side, without sufficiently analysing the inherent objective link.

3.4 … Failing to Meet the Challenges?

There are different issues involved, the most obvious is that CSR today has to emphasise, more than ever, that it is a matter of shaping public spaces, going even as far as to represent publicness. The era of pure distribution and redistribution, if it has ever existed, cannot play a further role. “Individual measures”—even if systematically bundled as “CSR-strategy”—fall short of reflecting two major moves that had been explored (see Ritzer 2014, p. 15):

  • The emergence of corporations as markets, and

  • The beginning implosion of the means of production and means of consumption.

One major challenge is in the view of the present author the failure to acknowledge that a very central issue of social responsibility—first going beyond corporate social responsibility—is the mode of socialisation itself. While there are many facets under which this can be discussed, the central points are around the positioning and relating of work, labour and public life. It is a widely discussed field in all genres of social science. It was already widely discussed in ancient Greece as issue of social science in general understanding, concerned with the distinction between chrematistike and oikonomia, using these poles not least for determining what freedom and thus a good life is (see for instance Dierksmeier and Michel 2009). For instance in the middle of the nineteenth century the topic was an issue in the light of the history of law, leading Henry Sumner Maine to supposing “that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract” (Maine 1861). Later Karl Polanyi brought discussion of the topic closer to the agenda of economics. He referred to distribution, reciprocity, and house-holding/management as principles guiding production and provision and symmetry, centricity and autarky as regulatory mechanisms. At the core of the then historically new stage we find according to his analysis that

[t]he market pattern, on the other hand, being related to a peculiar motive of its own, the motive of truck or barter, is capable of creating a specific institution, namely, the market. Ultimately, that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system. The vital importance of the economic factor to the existence of society precludes any other result. For once, the economic system is organized in separate institutions, based on specific motives and conferring a special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws. This is the meaning of the familiar assertion that a market economy can function only in a market society. (Polanyi 1944, p. 57)

Decisive is, however, that he also emphasises a “double movement”. In this respect, Mark Blyth states:

After all, if disembedding the market led to a double movement where labour demanded protection through an institutional reembedding, then was it not reasonable to export to expect, in turn, another reaction against those ‘embedding’ institutions by those most affected, namely capitalists? In fact, the political struggle between disembedding and reembedding the market continues today …. The contemporary neoliberal economic order can be seen as merely the latest iteration of Polanyi’s double movement. It is an attempt once again to disembed the market from society, to roll back the institutions of social protection and replace them with a more market-confirming institutional order. (Blyth 2002, p. 4)

This gains particular relevance under today’s circumstances that are—as pointed out throughout this elaboration—dissolving and redefining the traditional “roles and functions”, at present of specific interest to the “firm”, which in many cases is itself a market, though it remains ill-defined. With this we stand at a crossing of two drifts: the one is between work and labour, the other between soci[et]al and public and private.

Hannah Arendt’s work on The Human Condition (Arendt 1958) is also analysing societal development along these lines, importantly linking these debates to questions of private and public realms. Later again, this was discussed as matter of the crisis of the industrial and employment society (e.g. Matthes 1983; Gorz 1983) and finds another orientation today not least with adding the perspective of cooperatives (e.g. Graceffa 2017; recent: Standing 2018). These debates are essentially delivering a background for discussions about social responsibility in general and corporate social responsibility specifically. Merging these two issues—“economy and society” as one topic, “private and public” as the other topic, we are indeed facing those issues that had been raised by Milton Friedman, though this does not predetermine the conclusion. The following looks at some individual matters in question:

3.4.1 Can Institutions Have Responsibility?

As much as institutions have responsibility, it is defined by two pillars:

  • The general normative system, or formation that establishes the reference for any action;

  • The owners for whom the institution is only an organisational and logistic means—pursuing “business” as defined by the (group of) owners.

Seen in this light, they are responsible on the one hand for making profit—as far as this is the defined goal. It is somewhat surprising that Friedman is often criticised for clearly stating the nature of capitalism. Indeed, the capitalist enterprise as institution will only be “socially responsible”, as far as activities that are not of immediate meaning in the process of production and/or service provision nevertheless promote profitability. On the other hand, we are concerned with the challenge that the entire process of production and service provision is increasingly happening directly in and as part of public life: it depends on and vice versa shapes publicness.

The effect of any trickle-down effect is extremely questionable as it actually not only lacks any foundation for deriving rights. More important is the lack of des-embedding or disjunction. In other words, at stake is not the lack of responsibility, but the lack of economic action, defined as a social action. This is the reverse of what had been said before: responsibility is defined by the business-interest, a means to pursue it—be it directly or indirectly, be it part of a short-term calculation or any kind of a long-term business plan. Anything else is benevolence, which should not be confused with responsibility.

3.4.2 Can Responsibility Be Reduced on Moral and Ethical Attitudes and Normative Definitions?

We have to think of some ethical dimensions when it comes to responsibility. However, we are immediately again looking for an argument in the same vein: terminologically we are dealing with somebody being answerable, a matter responding to a question. In former times, when the term came in use, it was very much about being answerable according to the biblical quest

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’. (Mark 12: 30–31)

Historically this changed. Protestantism defined it as responsibility towards oneself, this way serving God—the understanding of “life that pleases God”; later then, with secularisation, only responsibility towards oneself remained. But, this decisively gained meaning as much as it reflected the new economic patterns as they had been presented by Karl Polanyi, namely the de-socialisation of economic practice, including the final stage of de-socialising work. Hence, we find the establishment of labour, defined by the value of labour power and experienced as alienated. There is wide debate on this topic and in particular the question to which extent the problem at stake is a centrally one of division of work or one of the separation of the worker from the means of production. The result is in any case similar: the worker loses control (i) over the process, (ii) over the results and (iii) the context. It must remain questionable if any progress can be made as long as relevant actors remain caught in double-bind situations, actually quite common in court decisions, dealing with the indefinable relationship of “rightfulness” and “legality”. An interesting detail is that we find as one of the synonyms for “rightfulness” the term “impartiality”, and other synonyms are “fairness” and “legitimacy”. This clearly highlights the need for defining clear criteria of the determining context and overall goal—for this reason the excursus on “adequate” and “inadequate” forms of property is of special meaning.

Looking at CSR, we are dealing with a set of incompatible levels of regulation—this is presented in the following Table 3.2, presuming that “regulating the social” in the present sense can only be seen as statutory task.Footnote 15

Table 3.2 Retrieving publicness of production
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This allows us to scrutinise economic processes not only as challenge for “socially responsible re-distribution”, but as matter of production. CSR is then—if not anyway part of the business-strategy—by definition an “add-on”, which resists regulation, or it may be seen as resistance, aiming at maintaining the fundamentals of the given capitalist formation while integrating at least parts of those conditions of formational change contradict the existing standard at the given time.—Two examples can illustrate this: in the one case, it is about opening the work organisation, promoting more flexible and employee-controlled processes. While this means losing some control, it also allows introducing another control mechanism. Today it is a well-known issue that the “opening” translates in many cases into the permanent availability. A second example can be taken from some digitisation industries. Technical means and needs that push towards socialisation are taken up. They are presented as new ways of self-determination, while they are in fact used as means of subordination and “privatised socialisation” and as privatisation of the socio-public. Public data are not only privately used, but the respective enterprises occupy them and even public spaces without being justifiably in a position to do so too.—For instance, the normative aspect of CSR arises in this light as challenge to secure that private criteria are not used to regulate public utilities. In particular, the array of data protection emerges as centrally effected by such change: While traditional requirements of protecting privacy persistently remain important, the new challenge is the protection of public spaces against infringement. CSR could play a role by increasing opportunities of emancipating infrastructures, not least allowing public access to and control of algorithms. This has to acknowledge a completely different localisation of the different actor-perspectives and even—at least in part—the redefinition of the difference of their characteristics as tentatively presented in Table 3.3. However, looking again at Corporate Social Responsibility, one may ask in which way we can still speak of corporations and their responsibility at all, in those cases, which are characterised by private undertakings within public spaces.

Table 3.3 Redefining producers, products and environments
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3.5 The Real Meaning of Digitisation—From the Deathbed of the National Welfare State to the Crèche of a Global Social Quality State

Corporate Social Responsibility is as problematic as it is ill-defined and varied. One point in question is that motives differ from case to case—this means not least that we find also some industry and sector specific patterns. This means that much of what is developed in the present reflections is concerned in particular with new industries that emerge in the context of digital technologies. The part that is of interest for the present reflections is characterised by the following aspects:

  • Actors are not traditional enterprises but quasi-markets;

  • Products and services are changing their character, leaving in some respect the individual worker/provider more isolated, however establishing also a tight network of socialised work and being.

Earlier this was already stated, emphasising that we witness a crossing of two drifts: the one is between work and labour, the other between soci[et]al and public and private. In reality we find a certain paradox, namely that at least the dominant, i.e. capital- and politically-strong new industries are moving in the public realm, actually even claim “being the public”, while private criteria and the claim of private gains lead their activity. This should not make us overlook that there surely is in several cases some benevolence behind it—as elaborated earlier (see Introduction), we are also concerned with a generational shift: a new enterprising spirit, not least influenced by the “protest of the post-war generation”.

In recent times, we find frequent salutations of the end of capitalism and equally frequent are the apocalyptic sentiment of another second phase of what occurs to be an eternal circle, the loop of raise and fall of empires and cultures. This may occur as a fear of the end of humankind, at least civilisation or as a somewhat milder form as The battle for digital supremacy—so the title in The Economist in March 2018 (The Battle 2018). Speaking of a loop can be justified by the fact that the existing solution is one that may be grasped under the one version of the title of the present reflections, namely the acceptance of The Comedy of Big Data Industries, i.e. the acceptance of fact that we are dealing with inherently public spaces. This alludes to the work by Carol M. Rose, who argues against Garrett Hardy’s thesis of the Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin 1968). Rose elaborates historically the existence of certain natural commons (see Rose 1986, 1994).—Although she was not—and hardly could be—concerned with the current advanced process of digital industries, she captures exactly the conditions that can today apply to this sector.

In a sense, this is the reverse of the “tragedy of the commons”: it is a “comedy of the commons,” as is so felicitously expressed in the phrase, “the more the merrier.” Indeed, the real danger is that individuals may “underinvest” in such activities, particularly at the outset. No one, after all, wants to be the first on the dance floor, and in general, individuals engaging in such activities cannot capture for themselves the full value that their participation brings to the entire group. Here indefinite numbers and expandability take on a special flavor, relating not to negotiation costs, but to what I call “interactive” activities, where increasing participation enhances the value of the activity rather than diminishing it. (Rose 1986, p. 768)

There are many different approaches that can be confected to such orientation: the accessibility and electability of alternative algorithms, a procedure of selling data instead of buying or at lest opting out of the big-business-big-data-use. Cooperatives are in this respect widely underexplored as genuine forms of corporate social responsibility. Seen in a conceptual light, they are working as quasi-public organisations, defined as multiple-goal entities with different points of reference. Important is to see them not as stakeholders, but as part of a citizenry of the organisation (see on citizenry of organisations Herrmann 2007).

3.6 Appendix—Far from Appendicitis—As Conclusions

There is a more general issue behind these questions, standing at the core of economics and being concerned with enterprising in a context of the hegemony of certain worldviews and ideas of men. Leaving the two antagonistic poles of materialism and idealism aside, we may see another set, spanning between solutionism as “limitless feasibility of everything” (“everything is possible”) on the one hand and a managerialist piecemeal view in line with Karl Raimund Popper’s evolutionism and the postulate of falsifiability with its implication of limiting action on piecemeal perspectives. While this seems to be at first glance indeed a wide spanning arch, we can also interpret this in a different light, suggesting that it is just a matter of discursiveness by which different roles in the public are taken. Philosophically we find on the one hand the suggestion that The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil 2005)—though frequently being staged as ultimate progression towards a breakthrough of artificial intelligence, it ultimately translates into a takeover of public realms by the singularity of profitability as the only objective (Dickey 2013). This is going hand in hand with concentralisation, openly admitted by Peter Thiel, co-founder of paypal contending that “[i]t’s one big transgressive idea, and you’re not allowed to talk about it. That’s a clue that it’s an under-explored idea. There are questions on what point is it good or bad for societies. From society’s perspective, it’s complicated. But from the inside, I always want to have a monopoly” (Cook 2015).

But this is not a rampant personal affectation. Looking at Uber, the “car-ride company”, it shows the deeper, structural dimension:

Uber’s objective was not to eliminate aspects of government oversight that no longer improved taxi service, but to eliminate the idea that taxis were a part of transport infrastructure that governments had any right to exercise oversight over. Uber’s objective was not to maximize competition subject to “level playing field” rules, but to seize control of the entire playing field and to eliminate meaningful competition. … If urban car service could be transformed from urban transport infrastructure into a purely discretionary consumer good, like theaters and restaurants, then governments could not rationally object if the entire industry became the private property of Uber’s Silicon Valley investors, or impose regulations designed to ensure that service was safe, affordable, and required to serve all citizens equally. (Horan 2017, p. 67f.)

While Ray Kurzweil’s reversed Big-Bang-Theory is surely at first glance fascinating, the analysis of reality—for instance in the works of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking—points more into the direction of inflation and no-boundary extensions. Let us consider the qualitative aspect connected with such processes of inflation and extension, and use this in a metaphorical way. Then we can realistically see two directions: the one is about the ongoing replication of business as usual, permanently expanding in new areas, the other is about the increasing integration by way of developing complexities.—The latter, looking at economic actors as enterprises, would in particular mean a “re-establishment” of economic activities as one part of soci(et)al re-production. As such, it goes beyond production of goods and re-socialises individuals, too. This somewhat extreme, formulation is deliberately chosen as it allows for escaping a strategy that is limited to redistributive activities. Talking about extension in a qualitative perspective means rejecting any monistic or dualist perspective on redistribution and/or recognition—two central concerns of social justice; thus, two central matters’ reflections on social responsibility have to tackle strategy. The juxtaposition of a monistic and dualist perspective is elaborated in the book presented by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth:

One of us, Axel Honneth, conceives recognition as the fundamental, overarching moral category, while treating distribution as derivative. Thus, he reinterprets the socialist ideal of redistribution as a subvariety of the struggle for recognition. The other one, Nancy Fraser, denies that distribution can be subsumed under recognition. Thus, she proposes a “perspectival dualist” analysis that casts the two categories as co-fundamental and mutually irreducible dimensions of justice. (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 2f.)

It remains surprising why an integrated perspective is not taken into account, namely the recognition of different ways of societal re-production, and thus different forms of re-distribution as forms of life.

A radical approach to Corporate Social Responsibility has to consider this seemingly very abstract perspective: it is now possible to clearly distinguish between four main forms of socialisation, all of them presenting different forms of social responsibility:

  • Subsistence socio-economy where the different facets of life are interwoven and defined within the societal context—such definition may be supporting or limiting the different activities.

  • The patriarchal firm where social responsibility is limited to calculating the contribution of some non-market-oriented activities to the core economic tasks—this includes development of enterprise welfare, risk management and philanthropic activities that increase reputation and the calculation of tax gains and other immediate material gains for the enterprise/cooperation.

  • The modern non-firm undertaking that internalises “non-market-oriented” activities in a way that enlarges the array of action, not simply by dispossession but by orienting on rent and arbitrage as increasingly replacing profit as economic motive—it may be said that in many cases especially gains from arbitrage are very close to unfair competition while presenting respective measures as increasing flexibility, enhancing mobility, openness towards new creative business models and the like (see in this context Khan 2017, in particular p. 780ff.).

  • A revived perspective on cooperatives, a cooperative sector and other forms of the solidarity economy that leans by its very nature towards what had been explored earlier—with reference to Carol M. Rose—under the heading of inherent public property.

There are always at least three major dangers of CSR:

  • Discharging the state, problematic as it opens doors towards arbitrariness and undermines the definition of social rights and entitlements;

  • Abusing financial and legal mechanism to undertake profitably investment with high reputationFootnote 16;

  • Defining and occupying public spaces and utilising public resources while maintaining and enhancing private appropriation.

While we surely find some pressure executed on big corporations that push towards some circumspect business strategies (e.g. Sorkin 2018; Gelles 2018; Jana Partners & CALSTRA 2018), the example of ‘Apple, Capitalizing on New Tax Law’ (Wakabayashi and Chen 2018) clearly shows the true orientation. In general, the profit-orientation was clearly outlined:

Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated. (Dunning 1996)

It remains open, though highly questionable, if today’s rent-seeking capital is moving into a radically different direction, recognising that social responsibility is not about doing something good but about acknowledging the processes of socialisation and recognising that Corporate Social Responsibility needs to be concerned with helping to set up a legally binding framework—nationally, regionally and globally. This challenge will not be addressed as long as change managers aim only on one-sided adaptability like for instance Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer suggest:

Companies must take the lead in bringing business and society back together. The recognition is there among sophisticated business and thought leaders, and promising elements of a new model are emerging. Yet we still lack an overall framework for guiding these efforts, and most companies remain stuck in a “social responsibility” mind-set in which societal issues are at the periphery, not the core. The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. (Porter and Kramer 2011, p. 64)

As long as society and the social are not the point of departure, it will hardly be possible to arrive at a radical Social Responsibility as framework of a wider public policy in which corporations play a role, but not even of a prior inter pares—such claim may only arise from undertakings that are truly public. Such statement is even more relevant, if we are dealing with undertakings that are moving in spaces of inherent public property.

We may well conclude—borrowing the format from the before quoted reviewer: For adequate profit, capital may calm down. A certain 10% may stabilise slightly employment, especially in the country of the main market. A 20% certainly will evoke some social initiatives. With 50%, a strategy is pronounced. A 100% enable it to reach out to communities. With 300%, it will systematically present itself as provider of public utilities, working for the common weal and it will even risk that the actual process of socialisation finds adequate public control and legal regulation.—Though one thing can be taken for granted: as much as money matters, as sure is that there is a need for strict, legally binding, regulations.