This book started out as a series of conversations between us about what we saw as the ‘missing’ role of government in corporate social responsibility (CSR). We are both trained as political scientists so our emphasis on government is not surprising. Moreover, our formative experiences of CSR involved government.
Jette worked as director of the Copenhagen Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, a government-sponsored think tank for CSR, from 2003 to 2007. She then spent six months working for the CEO of Maersk, a large shipping, terminals, and oil conglomerate, identifying CSR challenges and opportunities across the various business units.
Jeremy encountered CSR in the context of a research project with Jeremy Richardson examining UK government policy responses to unemployment in the early 1980s, which included policies to encourage and even shape CSR to address mass unemployment and urban decay. He researched the way in which Australian governments encouraged CSR in the 1990s, also initially in the context of an economic downturn.
Since CSR is often (still) defined as voluntary social and environmental initiatives by companies that go beyond legal requirements, most of the work on CSR has been conducted in business schools by management scholars. Many of these share neither our antennae for things governmental nor our experiences of CSR as partly, at least, a creature of government, and would regard government policy for CSR as a contradiction in terms. So we saw a need to probe more in depth the role of government as a driver of CSR in corporations.
Our curiosity and motivation were re-doubled when we both encountered ways in which governments even go so far as to make policy for CSR abroad – in other words, outside the territories in which national governments possess legitimate policymaking authority. And here we have another contradiction in terms –national governments making policies encouraging companies to be responsible internationally.
So two contradictions in terms about subjects so close to our hearts (i.e. government and CSR, national government and international company behaviour) seemed like an irresistible challenge for a book-length study.
