‘Coca-Cola quit India': Resisting CSR as a global management strategy

Bywater, Krista

The Coca-Cola Corporation[1] promotes itself as a responsible company while protesters from India and Colombia to the United States and Europe criticize its business practices. Coke, like many other transnational corporations (TNCs), has adopted corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies to protect its revenue and the reputation of its global goods and brand. Using a social movement against the Coca-Cola Corporation in India as a case study, this paper examines the ideological tenets and social impacts of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Villagers in Plachimada and several Indian towns charged Coke with depleting, polluting, and privatizing the community ground water as well as destroying people’s livelihoods. In response to the Indian movements and world-wide supporters, Coke instituted a water stewardship initiative as part of its CSR program. Unlike the majority of scholarship within critical CSR studies, this analysis illustrates the inability of CSR to limit the harmful effects of TNCs in underdeveloped countries.

In fact, rather than being used to curtail the harmful effects of economic globalization and transnational corporations, CSR is typically employed to limit governmental regulation, further neoliberal economic globalization, and justify increased foreign investment in the Global South. CSR helps companies, like Coke, appear environmentally responsible and to quell oppositional social movements without making meaningful changes to their business practices. As a result, CSR furthers the neoliberal agenda, which promotes economic globalization and foreign investment as the best means to achieve sustainable development. The paper concludes by positing that voluntary corporate self-regulation cannot achieve the same results as independent government oversight. This research is based on ethnographic evidence from eight months of field work in India and 105 in-depth interviews.

[1] Throughout the paper I also refer to the Coca-Cola Corporation by its popular name—Coke.

160.1 ‘Coca-Cola quit India': Resisting CSR as a global management strategy