Struggles for Regulatory Hardening: Exploring Swedish Politics on Corporate Social Responsibility

Elin Jönsson

The British Journal of Criminology, 2023, vol. 63, issue 5, 1184-1198

Abstract: In recent years, the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has undergone a shift towards hardening, illustrated by a wave of new mandatory and state-based regulation. This article aims to understand the dynamic behind this shift, by studying struggles for regulatory hardening in the Swedish Parliament. Drawing on a critical theory of contradictions, it proposes an understanding of CSR as a contradictory social formation, which structures the parliamentary struggles. Moreover, it suggests that although the hardening trend could amount to a crisis of the traditional understanding of CSR, politicians remain embedded in a neoliberal logic of regulation. The article ends with a call for research to continue to explore alternative roads towards minimizing corporate harm in the future.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; regulation; hardening; political debates; corporate harm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azac082 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:63:y:2023:i:5:p:1184-1198.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().