Large corporations have come to play a central role in today’s society. By analyzing how corporations describe their work with Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, my aim is to review how they view and relate to this role. CSR means that a corporation voluntarily takes a civic responsibility beyond that which is required by law. This can be in order to promote human rights, basic workers rights and a better environment, as well as fighting corruption. In order to get at the role played by CSR, I have studied texts dealing with the subject, which have been published on the internet by the five largest Swedish corporations. The texts have been analyzed with a critical discourse analysis model inspired by Norman Fairclough. This means that the texts are analyzed linguistically, that discourses are identified, and that social theories about globalization, protest movements and brand name marketing are used. The corporations base their texts on a public debate regarding a potential conflict betweengenerating largest possible profit and taking a corporate social responsibility. One side of the debate is represented by a neo-liberal market discourse, which places profit first, and the other by a social justice discourse, which places responsibility first. Together, these two discourses form key components in a particular discourse about CSR, which I have chosen to call a CSR-discourse. Finally, the result of the study is problemized by putting it in contexts which dominate our world today. Hereby, risks with the corporations’ way of handling CSR are brought to light in a democratic perspective. The corporations describe how they, through CSR, want to safeguard all that which they believe is good, but that this at the same time must bring the company profit. Nowhere in these texts do the corporations come near answering the fundamental question of for whom it is most important to live up to the values of CSR. The question is therefore; who benefits from today’s CSR?
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-2984 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Brattander, Eva |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för tematisk utbildning och forskning, Institutionen för tematisk utbildning och forskning |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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