Paddy Ireland

Corporate Social Responsibility in a Neoliberal Age

The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has risen to prominence with remarkable rapidity to become, in the words of The Economist, ‘an industry in itself, with full-time staff, newsletters, professional associations and massed armies of consultants’ (The Economist 2004). Embraced by corporations, touted by academics, and advanced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and policy makers as a potential mechanism for achieving social policy objectives and furthering economic development, CSR has become one of the flavours and hopes of the new Millennium. ‘By following socially responsible practices’, the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) Department for International Development (DFID) has claimed, ‘the growth generated by the private sector will be more inclusive, equitable and poverty reducing’ (DFID 2004).

Post-capitalist property

Abstract When writing about property and property rights in his imagined post-capitalist society of the future, Marx seemed to envisage ‘individual property’ co-existing with ‘socialized property’ in the means of production. As the social and political consequences of faltering growth and increasing inequality, debt and insecurity gradually manifest themselves, and with automation and artificial intelligence lurking in the wings, the future of capitalism, at least in its current form, looks increasingly uncertain. With this, the question of what property and property rights might look like in the future, in a potentially post-capitalist society, is becoming ever more pertinent. Is the choice simply between private property and markets, and public (state-owned) property and planning? Or can individual and social property in the (same) means of production co-exist, as Marx suggested? This paper explores ways in which they might, through an examination of the Chinese household responsibility system (HRS) and the ‘fuzzy’ and seemingly confusing regime of land ownership that it instituted. It examines the HRS against the backdrop of Marx’s ideas about property and subsequent (post-Marx) theorizing about the legal nature of property in which property has come widely to be conceptualized not as a single, unitary ‘ownership’ right to a thing (or, indeed, as the thing itself) but as a ‘bundle of rights’. The bundle-of-rights idea of property, it suggests, enables us to see not only that ‘individual’ and ‘socialized’ property’ in the (same) means of production might indeed co-exist, but that the range of institutional possibility is far greater than that between capitalism and socialism/communism as traditionally conceived.

From Lonrho to BHS: The Changing Character of Corporate Governance in Contemporary Capitalism

Edward Heath was not noted for his memorable turns of phrase. Indeed, one of the few phrases for which he is remembered—‘the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’—appears to have been unintended, the mistaken product of a mixture of vanity and myopia. In 1973, in a Commons debate on the talks taking place between the TUC and the CBI about inflation, Heath was asked to condemn the practices of Lonrho. Although he was short-sighted, Heath was loath to wear glasses and he couldn’t quite make out the words on the script provided by Number 10: ‘This is an unpleasant and unacceptable facet of capitalism’. By omitting the ‘t’, he unwittingly coined a phrase which continues to be wheeled out when particularly egregious corporate scandals come to light. It got one of its most recent airings in 2016 in the report of the House of Commons Joint Work and Pensions and Business, Innovations and Skills Committees into BHS. The way in which ‘Sir Philip Green, Dominic Chappell and their respective directors, advisers and hangers-on’ had got ‘rich or richer’ at the expense of ‘ordinary employees and pensioners’, the report concluded, was ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. It was used again in August 2017 by the Prime Minister, Theresa May, to describe the practices of companies who had ‘deliberately broken rules designed to protect their workers’ and ‘award[ed] pay rises to bosses that far outstrip[ped] the company’s performance’. It’s worth briefly reminding ourselves of the events that prompted Heath’s original condemnation. Lonrho had begun life in 1909 as a mining company, before gradually

Stakeholding in the Global Casino: A Reply to David Campbell

In the spring issue of the Journal of Law and Society, David Campbell responded to my pessimistic assessment of the potential of the stakeholding company as a vehicle for progressive social(ist) change.2 To the limited extent that he engaged with me rather than with a curious straw marxist of his own, his principal objection and one which deserves to be taken seriously was what he considered to be my exaggeration of the constraints on corporate behaviour. In this reply, I return briefly to this issue.3