What is it about?
The paper aims to explain why and how, in the USA, a very particular interpretation of economic liberalism, faring though different historical contexts, has generated, since the 1970s, a new kind of capitalism whose language, logic, legitimating paradigm and associated practices have become, thanks to “organic intellectuals” and active networks of power and influence, the “newspeak” and compass of chief executive officers from around the world, despite their always direst societal consequences.
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Why is it important?
Using history as a support to investigate the domestic and international relations contexts that bore financialized globalization, the paper is strongly located into political sociology. As such, it tries to identify precisely the networks of power and influence which transformed a specific interpretation of liberalism and business into a dominant paradigm and specific kind of capitalism, in the USA and the rest of the world. The approach helps to understand which sets of ideas and authors were deemed worth supporting by business and political networks of power and influence and how both sides drew on their reciprocal resources to transform their cosmogonies into dominant paradigms and real politics (corporate and States).
Perspectives
The paper provides a global but precise understanding of the complex processes that allowed some vested interests to impose their vision of economics and business on a domestic, then world, scale. It also questions the relevancy of that vision according to a presentation of the negative societal externalities the associated policies generated and according to the official investigations that have been conducted on the corporate and banking misdemeanors that it contributed to generate.
Professor Bernard SIONNEAU
Kedge Business School
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Legitimating corporate global irresponsibility, Journal of Global Responsibility, October 2010, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/20412561011079434.
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Resources
"Boosting, then trampling the Moral Contract: How financialized globalization gave birth to “Corporate Social Irresponsibility” in H. Bonin and P. Thomes (dirs.), Old Paternalism, New Paternalism, Post Paternalism (19th-21st centuries)
“Industrial paternalism”, “welfare capitalism” and “corporate social responsibility (Act I)”were useful managerial concepts and practices adopted by major publicly traded US corporations in order to correct the harshness of the 19th century U.S industrialisation process and soften the deep social crisis born of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. However, if the "stakeholder model" that was contained in those practices, was decisive in fostering a “contagion of prosperity” in the United States between the 1930s and 1960s, the financialisation of corporate strategies born of the 1970s stagflation, monetary, oil and industrial crises, rapidly emptied CSR of any tangible meaning. As a host of always bigger and direr corporate and banking scandals accompanied the victory of the "shareholder model", the not questioning of these major managerial mishaps by most academic CSR supporters, contributed to discredit both the CSR concept and its later associated practices (Act II) as well as the capability of a-moral functioning large stock-listed corporations and their leadership, to ever re-commit to the stakeholder model and behave as “globally responsible citizens”.
Bernard Sionneau, La construction du conservatisme moderne aux États-Unis. Paris: Les Éditions L'Harmattan, 2012, 225 pp. Collection “Pouvoirs comparés.”
Après l'élection à la présidence des États-Unis de Ronald Reagan, puis celle à deux reprises, de Georges W. Bush, on s'est beaucoup interrogé sur l'influence des réseaux "conservateurs" ou "néoconservateurs" dans la politique américaine. Quels liens ont-ils avec le Parti républicain ? Pourquoi et comment sont-ils parvenus à y occuper une place prépondérante ? La thèse défendue dans cet ouvrage préfacé par le Professeur James Ceaser, de l'Université de Virginie, éminent connaisseur des institutions américaines, est que, malgré une étiquette commune, ce conservatisme-là n'a jamais connu d'unité théorique. Il se révèle plutôt comme une coalition de groupes disparates (traditionnalistes, libertariens, conservateurs religieux, néoconservateurs), promouvant des principes différents, voire contradictoires, au-delà de ce qui a pu les rassembler épisodiquement. Ils se sont d'ailleurs montrés plus à l'aise dans leur opposition à la Gauche que lorsqu'ils tenaient en main les rênes du pouvoir, face au pragmatisme d'un président de leur camp comme Ronald Reagan. Autre point essentiel : ils ont créé une infrastructure institutionnelle complexe qu'il s'agit de décortiquer. Animés par de grandes familles philanthropiques issues du monde des affaires et par des fondations nouvelles, de nombreux "think thanks" ont été dynamisés, non sans hostilité de la part de l'establishment intellectuel souvent proche du Parti démocrate. Il s'agit ici, en termes de science politique, de révéler la mise en action des réseaux impliqués, en tenant compte des idéologies, des stratégies et des jeux d'influence qu'ils véhiculent dans les allées du pouvoir.
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