Against Theory: Redefining Corporate Social Responsibility Using a Lacanian Perspective

While we have been congratulating ourselves that CSR has entered into mainstream organisational practice and have been analysing its effect, events have been happening which we have ignored. Recently we have seen blatant failures in social responsibility when firms such as Volkswagon have spent their effort in inventing systems to cheat monitoring rather than spending the effort in improving their products. Similarly we have seen organisations such as FIFA shown to be corrupt and lacking in governance. It has been shown through such events that CSR and governance cannot be separated and must be linked in theory as well as in practice. So it is apparent that we cannot be complacent and that CSR as a concept has some failings which need to be addressed and that governance also has some failings. According to Jacques Lacan the world is a minor on which we express ourselves to ourselves. In this chapter we use the Lacanian perspective to argue that the study of corporate social responsibility has become a narcissistic domain in which people argue about definitions and history rather than being concerned with development and new theorising.