A dark side of political CSR: The Marikana Massacre and the dialectic negation of responsibility between business and the state

The political CSR conversation represents an important corrective to mainstream, instrumentalist conceptions of CSR in the management literature. Yet still too little attention is given to the processual interactions between... [ view full abstract ]

The political CSR conversation represents an important corrective to mainstream, instrumentalist conceptions of CSR in the management literature. Yet still too little attention is given to the processual interactions between business and the state, especially those giving rise to deleterious social outcomes. Focusing on an extreme example of such negative outcomes, I ask, how do business-state interactions involving political CSR efforts lead to massacre? Based on an analysis of interview and document data spanning 15 years, I develop a process model, in which dialectic business-state interactions give rise to ambiguous rules and the negation of responsibility. This suggests a “dark side” to political CSR and emphasises the need for processual analyses.