How business and government interact to dissipate their social responsibilities

What is it about?

Like many others, I was shocked by the Marikana massacre in 2012, as well as the realisation that Lonmin's failure to live up to its promise to build 5500 houses contributed at least to some of the underlying conditions for the massacre (as conceded even by Lonmin managers in judicial commission hearings). Was this just another case of corporate irresponsibility or was something more complicated and interesting at play? Having collected data on mining companies in this area since 2001, I suspected that our current theories about corporate irresponsibility were insufficient in explaining this, and so I embarked on a study of how business-government interactions created the underlying conditions that gave rise to the Marikana massacre. This analysis resulted in a model of “dynamic de-responsibilization,” that is, a process in which business–government interactions progressively dissipate the adopted and enacted social responsibilities of both the government and business.

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Why is it important?

The argument is practically important, because it shows that a dynamic process involving various role-players’ diverse actions and reactions, each of which might seem innocuous on their own, can progressively lead to severe harm to vulnerable stakeholders and corresponding reputation and other damage to both government and business. Government officials and business managers should attend to the important risks associated with ostensibly helpful offers of corporate responsibility, and to the need to strengthen the government’s role as custodian of democratic accountability. Theoretically speaking, the paper develops a theory of corporate irresponsibility as a processual phenomenon, and it extends and to some extent challenges existing critiques of CSR.

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