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Question

Is corporate social responsibility possible? Adam Furnarie


Answer

Geert Lovink: I've got a friend in Amsterdam, Evelyn [] and she's doing a lot of research into this field of corporate social responsibility. It is a very special jargon. It's a discourse that came up in the '80s and '90s and is now spreading across the globe and most corporations use it, talk about it. For me it's pure ideology. So it is manufactured by PR firms and it is used as a tool, as a weapon, in the media battles; think about Nike, think about all the complaints about computer waste and the computer firms and the way they are implicated in the waste production of toxic waste and the dumping of toxic waste in poor countries. So, for me, we have to really focus on this issue as a media issue. We cannot look beyond that and say, well, if companies improve a little bit, they can get a logo on their product saying that their social responsibility is all right. I would, myself, not go for such standards, code of conduct that go with this rhetoric. Instead, I would attack the rhetoric itself and show who are behind the manufacturing of these slogans and these ideas; because there is in fact very little known about the whole PR branding of such issues. There's even less known about how large corporations are in fact at war with activists