The End of Meaningful CSR?
In this article, co-authors W. Lance Bennet and Julie Uldam reflect on the inspiration behind their research article, “Corporate Social Responsibility in The Disinformation Age,” published in Management Communication Quarterly.
We have been witnessing a political backlash against corporate social responsibility (CSR) and related environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics and investment standards. After a period of both citizens and politicians looking to companies to drive societal transformations such as the green transition, we found this political backlash against CSR and ESG puzzling and worrying. At least 49 anti-ESG bills were introduced across the US in 2023. For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned public pension funds and other state agencies from ESG investing, saying, “Corporations across America continue to inject an ideological agenda through our economy rather than through the ballot box.” Other conservatives, including former Vice President Mike Pence, echoed DeSantis’s rhetoric by referring to ESG as “radical.”
In our article, “Corporate Social Responsibility in the Disinformation Age,” we wanted to examine this shift. We were particularly interested in exploring the role of disinformation in CSR communication. We examined instances of corporate and political communication from the beginning of the 20th century until today. We identified two different kinds of disinformation: (1) Strategic disinformation which comes primarily from corporations themselves in attempts to hide harmful products and business practices. Strategic disinformation has a long history and includes hiding the public harms of smoking tobacco, the climate impact of fossil fuels, the dangers of pesticides, and the abuses of sweatshop labor, and (2) systemic disinformation, which is facilitated by digitally networked disinformation and often produced for political and economic ends that directly threaten liberal ideals about public goods in which CSR is anchored. It is systemic disinformation that enables the current political backlash against CSR and ESG values.
Various former center-right parties have won votes by communicating a toxic mix of social and environmental extremism. For example, the underlying economic motivations that led the U.K. Conservative Party into the Brexit campaign were dressed in persuasive anti-immigration rhetoric, attacks on EU economic policies, and false economic promises engineered by the original neoliberal think tank, the IEA. In Germany, a neoliberal nationalist party (the Alternative for Germany) was invaded by white nationalist movements, creating a disruptive illiberal communication repertoire. In the U.S., Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement took over much of the Republican party, raising doubts about the integrity of elections while attacking institutions from schools to businesses for promoting “woke” values. These attacks on progressive values create challenges for companies attempting to implement and communicate the benefits of CSR programs. In addition, political information sites such as Fox News, Epoch Times, Breitbart, or Daily Caller, spread disinformation in formats that resemble news, while joining politicians in branding the traditional news media as “lying press” and “fake news.”
The systemic disinformation has framed ESG investing (and CSR more generally) as unacceptable abuses of corporate power to advance an extreme leftist political agenda. The dilemmas of conflicting political pressures operating through irreconcilable communication logics threaten the very future of CSR and ESG. Responding to political attacks on ESG criteria for investment, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pushed back during a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, saying, “They’re trying to demonize the issues,” likely referring to Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeting, “The S in ESG stands for satanic.” The Danish bank, Danske Bank, is another example of a company getting caught between liberal and illiberal communication logics. In 2022 and 2023, the bank was criticized by climate activists and NGOs in Denmark for not taking its sustainability initiatives far enough, including its plans to divest from oil extraction. At the same time, Danske Bank was blacklisted in the state of Texas for saying the bank would not invest in fossil fuel companies.
These pressures to avoid ESG engagement specifically and CSR engagement more generally are amplified by several properties of systemic disinformation environments. Perhaps most importantly, false and polarizing information circulating about companies is difficult to manage through conventional PR and public education strategies because much disinformation bypasses traditional mass media channels and filters. Systemic disinformation has not replaced strategic disinformation. Rather, systemic disinformation risks encouraging strategic disinformation. Irresponsible corporate actors such as oil companies add to the noise on social media with strategic disinformation campaigns often run through fake accounts and Astroturf organizations.
Our advice to both scholars and practitioners is that we need to develop new paradigms for action and research. Systemic disinformation may change the terms of corporate engagement. From a hopeful perspective, companies and investment funds can form alliances to counter systemic disinformation and play more active public roles in promoting the societal benefits of CSR through ESG practices and measures. From a skeptical perspective, systemic disinformation threatens consumer brands and risks political reprisals, which may increase incentives to resort to greenwashing and other forms of strategic deception. In short, it is important to understand both types of disinformation because they interact in ways that may change the viability of CSR itself. These risks pose the question: Is this the end of meaningful CSR?
