Editorial

Citation

Bazin, Y. (2016), "Editorial", Society and Business Review, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 106-109. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-05-2016-0035

From society and business to business in society

“Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine” Friedman (1962, p. 133).

The decade of existence of the Society and Business Review could be seen as an academic and editorial materialization of what Milton (1962) seemed to fear. We do agree with him that the idea of corporate officers being responsible (and accountable) is a “subversive doctrine”, and a much needed one! Over the years, authors have published – here and in other journals – many fascinating articles, building brick by brick the intellectual project of offering an alternative to the mainstream financial stockholder-centric model. We hope, and like to think, that the SBR has contributed to the resistance, subversion and proposal. A lot of work is still needed obviously, but this present issue is very special to us; it is the journal’s 10-year anniversary.

To celebrate a decade of existence, we selected seven papers that we think offer a fair representation of the journal. We have then offered their authors to re-publish them with a foreword that would reflect on the evolution of the topic they tackled and its relevance today. Taken together, these articles draw a picture of our editorial line. As an introduction, we would like to clarify why the Society and Business Review is not about business and society, but rather about business in society.

The very idea of a corporate social responsibility as a principle or a value can be traced back to the early 1920s and became fully institutionalized in the 1950s, as witnessed by the birth of the academic journal Business and Society in 1960. According to Frederick (1994), scholarly works on the link between businesses and societies shifted slowly, moving away from the idea of responsibility toward the notion of responsiveness. He, thus, offers to understand CSR as an ability to account for, to respond and to react to the organizations’ environment and stakeholders.

In his seminal article, Carroll (1979, p. 500) offers a clear statement defining what CSR is: “the social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time”. It is worth noting that the categories mentioned (economic, legal, ethical and discretionary) are neither mutually exclusive nor additive but rather an evolving continuum of responsibilities organizations have to face.

The ideas of business and society and business in society are, according to Siltaoja and Onkila (2013), different understandings of what social responsibility means in corporate discourses. For the defenders of the in, corporations ground their legitimacy and their raison d’être in the delegation by societies of mandates to operate on segments of economic activities that give them the right to operate and to create value (Wood, 1991). In this perspective:

[…] businesses and other organizations have been understood to interact with society because they are part of it and are in partnership with other focal actors – emphasizing the view we call business in society […] The distinctive elements of this kind of “European CSR” are the inclusion of regulated industrial relations, labour law and corporate governance (Siltaoja and Onkila, 2013, pp. 359-360).

For Wood (1991), the expression “business and society” caries an ambiguity about the hierarchy between the two words and tends to place first and foremost the corporation its constraints and its objectives. This opposition between “and” and “in” echoes how Matten and Moon (2008) explain the different conceptions of CSR in the USA, where they call it “explicit”, and, in Europe, where it would be “implicit”. According to Siltaoja and Onkila (2013), the and is explicit, and the in is implicit (Table I).

Instead of understanding corporations as being ontologically free to act, or not, and, thus, to engage their responsibility, or not, the “business in society” perspective puts society first as a source and frame of economic activity. This echoes Breton and Pesqueux’s (2006, p. 8) conceptual point of departure:

[…] we start by refusing to consider shareholders as the alpha and omega of the corporation while placing society, which is supposed to have the first and the last role in our western democracies, at the origins of every entrepreneurial activity.

Consequently, corporations will be understood as social institutions (Davis and Blomstrom, 1971) that are not fully independent of the environments in which they are embedded.

A “business in society” perspective is a counterpoint to the current managerialist trend, and its major development that is New Public Management, according to which every institution in society could, and should, apply managerial models and tools (Kilkauer, 2013). In the SBR, we instead encourage academics to question the legitimacy of corporations and to interrogate their responsibility and accountability, and we call for a fine-grained understanding and integration of the multitude of stakeholders they impact (Mitchell et al., 1997). This multitude was already envisioned by Berg and Zald in their article Business and Society published in 1978 in the Annual Review of Sociology in which they listed many individual and organizational actors corporations came to be connected with through their institutionalization process in societies, that is, unions, regulatory actors, states, political parties, foreign policies, etc. This legitimation project was partly supported by the organization of inter-corporation structures (lobbies, trade associations and interest groups), leading the authors to state that “business now behaves more like a visible social movement” (Berg and Zald, 1978, p. 138).

One could place the business in society perspective within the opposition offered by Breton and Pesqueux (2006) between the “live in” inspired by the enlightenment and the libertarian “live with” (Table II).

The “business in society” approach is fully grounded in the perspective opened by Shocker and Setii (1974, p. 67), according to whom:

Any social institution – and Business is no exception – operates in society via a social contract, expressed or implied, whereby its survival and growth are based on: the delivery of some socially desirable ends to society in general; and the distribution of economic, social or political benefits to groups from which it derives its power.

As an heir of these analyses, the Society and Business Review conceives corporations as social institutions fully embedded in societies. Although refusing the libertarian assumption that corporations would be above or outside societies, we acknowledge their necessary autonomy and their multiple contributions. Our aim is, therefore, to analyze their place and role as organizations within society currently in a rich and dynamic manner. Consequently, the expansion of the managerial rationality – the infamous managerialism and its New Public Management – will be one of our main points of focus. The editorial line of the journal welcomes this perspective understood in the wider sense (both conceptually and internationally) of critical analysis (understood as a position of distance and discernment) of the links and interactions between societies and businesses.

Our call for a true international approach finds a strong echo in this anniversary issue in the very first paper selected. Indeed, in their 2008 piece, Chris Skinner and Gary Mersham examined specific corporate social responsibility practices in South Africa, far from the Western sphere (Skinner and Mersham, 2008). As a counterpoint, we then asked Françoise Quairel-Lanoizelé who focused on the French CAC40 to understand if competition and CSR were compatible (Quairel-Lanoizelé, 2012). In the same movement and fully answering the SBR call to explore business in society, Nikolai Mouraviev and Nada Kakabadse critically studied public–private partnerships (Mouraviev and Kakabadse, 2012).

In a more conceptual perspective, Hugo Letiche published here an exploration of the phenomenon of commodification, putting it in tension with the notion of “doubling” (Letiche, 2009). Diving into organizations by focusing on actors’ practices, Silvia Gherardi and Manuela Perrotta offered in 2010 an in-depth analysis of the process of induction. In between these approached, reflecting on her notion of psychological contract, Denise Rousseau offered us in 2012 a philosophical confrontation with her famous homonym Jean-Jacques to discuss the status of free will in contracts (Rousseau, 2012).

Finally, we conclude with Kévin André, who’s paper explores the very promising avenue of research opened by care ethics, linking it to another major topic that we would like to see more often in the SBR: business education (André, 2012).

Table I.

Business in society as implicit CSR

Explicit CSR	Implicit CSR
Describe all corporate activities to assume responsibility in society	Describes all formal and informal institutions of a society which assigns and defines the extent of corporate responsibility for the interests of an entire society
Consists of voluntary corporate policies, programs and strategies	Consists of values, norms and rules which result in (chiefly codified and mandatory) requirements for corporations
Motivated by the perceived expectations of all stakeholders of the corporation	Motivated by the societal consensus on the legitimate expectations toward the role and contribution of all major groups in society, including corporations

Source: Adapted from Matten and Moon (2008, p. 410)

Table II.

Business in society or corporations living in societies

Living in	Vivre avec
Philosophy of the age of enlightenment	Liberal philosophy
Rousseau and Kant	Hobbes and locke
Representative democracy and liberty	Communitarian utopia
Law, its genesis, validation and application	Standards and interests
Universality	Self-regulation, self-judgment and self-sanctioning
Justice as an institution	Justice as a production
The wiseman, the judge	The expert
Politics et moral	Politics and ethics

Source: Adapted from Breton and Pesqueux (2006, p. 16)