Corporations as Arenas of Responsibility and Irresponsibility: A Multi-Level Theory
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Wed 12 Nov 25
13:00 - 14:00
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Online
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Event speaker
Dr Gregory Jackson, King’s College London
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Event type
Lectures, talks and seminars
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Event organiser
Essex Business School
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Contact details
Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes rgnune@essex.ac.uk
To critically discuss Corporate Social Responsibility as a process that simultaneously constrains and reproduces corporate wrongdoing.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often portrayed as a moral corrective to the harms of capitalism. Yet CSR can also enable new forms of irresponsibility. This talk develops a multi-level theory of CSR as a Janus-faced phenomenon—both a countermovement that re-embeds markets in moral norms and a movement that furthers marketization.
Drawing on Polanyi and Hirschman, we trace recursive cycles of responsibility and irresponsibility across macro (regulation), meso (organizational practice), and micro (individual ethics) levels. By showing how CSR simultaneously constrains and reproduces corporate wrongdoing, we invite a rethinking of moral agency and governance in contemporary capitalism.
Speaker
Gregory Jackson is Professor of Comparative Business at King’s College London. His research explores how capitalism is organized and governed across firms, markets, and states, focusing on corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, employment relations, and civil society. He examines how institutions shape business behaviour, inequality, and the climate transition, combining sociological and comparative approaches across the Global North and South.
Gregory’s work has appeared in leading journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and Regulation & Governance. He serves as Editor at Human Resource Management Journal and the British Journal of Industrial Relations and previously as Editor-in-Chief of Socio-Economic Review. Before joining King’s, he held professorships at Freie Universität Berlin, Loughborough University London, and University of Bath. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University.
