Review
'Banerjee pulls the beguiling mask off corporate social responsibility. Taking the vantage point of the world's poor, he shows CSR to be cruel hoax - corporations' cynical effort to undermine growing demands for economic and environmental justice.'- Paul S. Adler, University of Southern California, US'This book problematizes the win-win assumption underlying discourses of CSR and suggests that it is a rhetoric that is invariably subordinated to that of corporate rationality. Rather than see CSR as providing the means to transform corporations by advocating a stakeholder view of the firm it argues that CSR represents an ideological movement designed to consolidate the power of transnational corporations and provide a veneer of liberality to the illiberal economic agenda of the major global institutions.'- Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia'Dr. Banerjee offers us a refreshing analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in an otherwise comparatively turgid literary landscape. People may disagree with his criticism that because of its preoccupation with shareholder value, the corporation is an inappropriate "agent for social change" but it is backed up by strong theoretical and substantive empirical analysis. In the absence of legislation, he argues, corporations will protect the interests of shareholders and other primary stakeholder groups such as employees or creditors rather than the interests of vulnerable communities that are the victims of socially and environmentally destructive corporate practices. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with what might be seen as the most serious dilemma of our age.'- David Knights, University of Keele, UK'Bold, insightful and ambitious, this important and provocative book exposes the contradictions and hypocrisies of corporate social responsibility. Dr. Banerjee draws from a wealth of knowledge and thought to develop an accessible and compelling analysis that locates corporate social responsibility in its historical, legal, social, and political context. This is a rare work that looks beyond the "win-win" rhetoric of corporate social responsibility to examine the impact of corporate power in the global political economy on development, human rights, and the environment.'- David Levy, University of Massachusetts, US
Stephen Linstead, University of York, UK
`Bobby Banerjee takes on the popular mythologies of neo-liberal corporate social responsibility with enviable flair and a thoroughness of scholarship that will dismay its apologists. His critique extends from the origins of the modern corporation and its well-known abuses and excesses to far harder targets - the more attractive alternatives that have been developed for theory and practice that, as Banerjee shows brilliantly, only serve to mask continuing neo-colonial abuses. Banerjee is not content simply to expose the impossibilities of doing good works whilst maximizing shareholder value, the win-win view of CSR, but he bites the bullet with some uncompromising but realistic proposals for the future reconstruction of CSR both as a field of study and as a business practice. We have needed this exposure of the bad and the ugly for a long time. The current versions of CSR are simply just not good enough.'
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