Toward an Integration of Corporate Disobedience in CSR

This paper follows the political turn that corporate social responsibility (CSR) took recently in studying the political roles of private firms as a complement to public authority, and it proposes a new stream of conversations on the additional political function of corporations: being a counterweight to public authority. In doing so, it takes issue with the legalist assumption that companies ought to comply with the law that was part of the first attempts to conceptualize CSR and that continuously and discretely influences theory and practice. This paper adopts a meta-normative perspective and draws on theories of political obligation to discuss the conditions under which it becomes morally acceptable for corporations to disobey the law, as they assume the role of counterweight to political authorities spanning from authoritarian to liberal democratic regimes. The paper also maps the key issues at stake and indicates directions for further research.