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Signposts or weathervanes? The curious case of corporate social responsibility and conflict minerals

Arikan, Ozlem; Reinecke, Juliane; Spence, Crawford; Morrell, Kevin

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Authors

Ozlem Arikan

Juliane Reinecke

Crawford Spence

Kevin Morrell



Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is often framed in terms of opposing constructions of the firm. These reflect, respectively, different accounts of its obligations: either to shareholders or to stakeholders (who include shareholders). Although these opposing constructions of corporate responsibility are diametrically opposed, they are also much more fluid and mobile in certain contexts, since they can act as discursive resources that are deployed and brought into play in the struggle over shaping what responsibility means. They are less the fixed, ideological “signposts” they might appear, and more like “weathervanes” that move alongside changing rhetorical currents. To show this, we analyse the Securities and Exchange Commission consultation process, and legislation, relating to the provenance of “conflict minerals”. We identify two dialectically opposed camps, each seeking to influence final legislation and with end goals in keeping with the shareholder/stakeholder dichotomy. One camp lobbied for firms to scrutinize their entire supply chain, constructing the firm as a “global citizen” with very wide social responsibilities. The second camp lobbied for a lighter touch approach, constructing the firm as a “trader”, with much narrower social responsibilities. We analyse the complex interplay between these two opposed camps, our contribution being to show how both deploy competing conceptions of the corporation as discursive resources.

Citation

Arikan, O., Reinecke, J., Spence, C., & Morrell, K. (2017). Signposts or weathervanes? The curious case of corporate social responsibility and conflict minerals. Journal of Business Ethics, 146(3), 469-484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2935-3

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 31, 2015
Online Publication Date Nov 16, 2015
Publication Date 2017-12
Deposit Date May 25, 2017
Publicly Available Date May 26, 2017
Journal Journal of Business Ethics
Print ISSN 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN 1573-0697
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 146
Issue 3
Pages 469-484
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2935-3
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1378210

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © The Author(s) 2015 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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