Corporations As Arenas of Responsibility and Irresponsibility: A Multi-Level View

We examine the relationship of corporate responsibility and irresponsibility across multiple levels of analysis. While corporate responsibility and irresponsibility were often considered to be opposites, recent literature has problematized the dynamic relationship between them. We argue that corporate responsibility may be an ethical response to past irresponsibility by companies, but also ultimately enable new forms of corporate irresponsibility. In this paper, we explore these dynamic tensions from a Polanyian perspective of embedding and disembedded capitalism. We examine these movements and countermovements at different levels of analysis in order to show the potential and limitations of corporate responsibility in addressing core sources of irresponsibility. At the societal level, we explore the emergence of 'transparency regime' focused on market-oriented disclosure. At the organizational level, we focus on the phenomenon of greenwashing through decoupling of positive responsible actions from the prevention of negative irresponsible actions. At the individual level, we focus on the psychology of moral hypocrisy and its role for consumers and employees. Taken together, the paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to disentangle and understand the ambivalence related to corporate responsibility among both scholars and citizens.