IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 96

Commentary
Commentary
The Everyday Ethics of Corporate
Social Responsibility
Jessica Smith
Engineering, Design and Society Department
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401 USA
" Corporations shape human experience not only
in spectacular and disastrous ways, but also in
mundane, every day, ambivalent, and positive
ways. They are, after all, the source of or conduit
for much of what we wittingly and unwittingly produce
and consume as we breathe, eat, drink, read,
work, play, and move about the world... No human
alive today is breathing air or drinking water that
has not been touched by corporate action " [1].
 As cAptured in the above quote, it is difficult
to underestimate the influence of corporations on
our everyday lives. People around the world are
increasingly holding corporations accountable for
their practices and seeking ways to rectify their unequal
distribution of the risks and benefits among differently
positioned populations. The contested field
of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged as
corporate leaders sought out ways to strategically
manage their firms' relationships with society.
While it is tempting to treat CSR as a set of policies,
I define it as a " dynamic and contested field
of relational practice " in which corporate and other
actors hold each other to account [2]. There is a
grave danger in equating CSR policies with actual
practices, as identified by a host of social scientific
studies exposing the gap between corporate discourse
and behavior. My book Extracting Accountability:
Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility
shows that a company's public reputation, its environmental
impacts, and its contribution to social
wellbeing all emerge from the everyday decisions of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3197118
Date of current version: 16 September 2022.
96
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
the people who enact corporate forms through their
everyday work, from executives to engineers. These
decisions shape and are shaped by official corporate
policies along with broader cultural discourses
of responsibility, histories of corporate-community
relations, and employees' own ethical frameworks.
Far from being static, CSR is made-and remade-
as engineers and others respond to calls for greater
accountability, from concerns raised by neighbors
at backyard barbeques to media exposés of ethical
failings. This dynamic of holding-to-account and
response happens internally as well, as employees
attune their actions to the expectations of their coworkers
and managers.
There is a fundamental tension between some sectors
of the public asking corporations to " do more "
and take on greater responsibility, on the one hand,
and academic critiques that CSR ensconces the
power of the private over the public sphere, on the
other hand. At its core, CSR is a private form of governance
that seeks to " do well " by the public while
maintaining the profitability of corporations. Scholars
critique CSR for shoring up the moral authority
of corporations to present themselves as solutions
to problems that they themselves define [3], [4]. In
contrast with the principles of responsible research
and innovation, for example, CSR does not provide
satisfying guidance on how to " navigate power inequalities,
divergent interests, and diverse cultures of
communication and governance " [5]. As a case in
point, while virtually all CSR discourses and practices
uphold a commitment to " stakeholders, " they generally
leave corporations in charge of determining who
a " stakeholder " is and determining the appropriate
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