CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Ilardo, Matteo Giuseppe |
|---|---|
| Title | Corporate Power Analysis: a Governmental Approach to the Study of the Corporate Social Responsibility System of Governance |
| Summary | Multinational Corporations (MNCs) are tremendously involved into every major societal challenge of today. With governments struggling in addressing major global issues, society is now increasingly calling in the private sector to do so by asking for companies to promote positive social change. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) embodies this new position of business in society and makes corporations no longer mere objects of regulation but rather political actors themselves involved in the definition and establishment of rules and norms. The scope of this thesis is to investigate nature and scale of MNCs’ political authority in the international system through the analysis of the CSR regime to provide for a better understanding of these new forms of governance. Yet, for this to be possible, a context-specific study of power is needed. Following a power analysis in which different power considerations are connected to different possible reasons for MNCs’ compliance with socially-responsible policies, CSR is here interpreted as a system of self-discipline and conformity from which MNCs result being both empowered and constrained. CSR – a by-product of the broader neoliberal regime of governmentality – by redefining the boundaries between public and private, invests firms with political authority while at the same time reinventing their social role in a way that the resulting system of governance ultimately both governs through and consists of the very success of its discourse in the global economy. |
| Supervisor | Astrov, Alexander |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/ilardo_matteo.pdf |
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