From Corporate Social Responsibility to Creating Shared Value: Contesting Responsibilization and the Mining Industry Available to Purchase

This chapter analyzes the polysemous understandings of responsibility that animate corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the global mining industry, which is criticized for promoting a shift from government-enforced regulation of industry to more devolved and voluntary governance, allowing corporations to offer themselves up as solutions to problems they help to define. This governance partially responsibilizes individuals and communities impacted by industry, attempting to cultivate entrepreneurial subjects. Criticizing the responsibilization framework, communities frequently invoke responsibility to call for more responsive and enduring relationships with corporations. Finally, the new era of corporate social value maintains and perhaps accentuates these programs’ focus on generating economic value while dispersing potential calls for accountability among a wider net of actors. The chapter argues that critical appraisals of CSR must consider the kinds of responsibilities its current frameworks presume and seek to promote, at the expense of alternatives such as rights, obligations, and consent.