“All gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperize the recipients,” wrote Dickens in Hard Times. Dinah Rajak uses this quote as the epigraph to a chapter of her book, In Good Company, a multi-sited ethnography of what the author calls the “new orthodoxy” of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). She analyzes CSR in terms of the politics of gift exchange between unequal partners, whereby the gift strengthens the authority of the giver over the recipient.
The book positions itself within an emerging scholarship that seeks to transcend the polarized view of CSR as either panacea or mere facade by closely examining its actual effects. Rajak studies CSR by following the third largest mining company in the world, Anglo American, across three different spaces/scales. First, she focuses on the “ritualistic theaters of virtue” at CSR conventions in London (the “CSR capital of the world”). Next, she shifts to Anglo's traditional home base of South Africa, and its Johannesburg headquarters, where she places CSR in the longer historical context of the company's paternalistic practices of the past, finding more continuities than sharp breaks. One of the strengths of the book is its grounding in a particular national history, as Rajak shows how CSR helps the company renegotiate its relationship to the state in a changing South Africa. She thus places herself among those scholars who do not see the power of corporations as leading to the decline of the nation-state.
In the platinum mining center of Rustenburg, Rajak examines Anglo's HIV treatment program for its workforce, acknowledging the role that the company played in recognizing the seriousness of the epidemic before the state ever did. However, she also focuses on the increased control over workers' lives, the heightened division between employees and their families (who generally do not receive treatment), and the problems that emerge when people become too sick to work and thus lose access to HIV treatment. The author then looks at company CSR programs for education and enterprise training. As at the global level, here company discourse extols self-reliance and entrepreneurship, echoing the culture of “patriotic capitalism” in contemporary South Africa. Yet their actual relationship with local NGOs and residents is steeped in the paternalism and deference of the gift; as one of the company's “local partners” says, “But we must be grateful” (p. 211).
While Rajak acknowledges that “in many cases CSR is effective at achieving particular goals” (14), for her CSR is first and foremost a source of immense power for companies. Her book will interest scholars studying the social life of corporations in that she shows concretely how CSR provides a particular industry with the authority necessary to counter various challenges and critiques.
Although Rajak writes that in CSR “the gift masquerades as impersonal market relations,” what really emerges from her book is the intertwining of the two at the heart of the system. Rajak implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) critiques those who frame gift relations as an alternative to the “harsh logic of the market” (238); she instead sees the two as complementary. This puts her book into dialogue with scholars and theorists of capitalism more broadly, even if the precise link between the power and authority derived from gift giving, on one hand, and capitalist profit and value, on the other, could have been made clearer. This question could form the basis for subsequent analysis building on Rajak's insights.
