A New Sense of CSR in the Age of Ecological and Migration Crisis

Corporate Social Responsibility is an international self-regulation on the production side of the economic activities of large companies/monopolies at the national and international level that has much in common with ethic codes (as it is related to production and consumer rights). The principal claim against the CSR is to use it as a PR tool for improving the corporate image. Against the backdrop of the ecological crisis of the world triggered by the contradiction between the capital and nature and mass migration from underdeveloped countries to the industrially developed ones, the role of CSR should be reconsidered and reassessed. This paper argues that the Marxist semiotic discourse analysis could give the reliable terms to explain the CSR’s new meaning in the contemporary world. After the 1970 Washington Consensus (Dezelay, 1998), IMF made an attempt to introduce the neoliberal approach to New Public Management (NPM) in South America. The devastating consequences are even accepted by Word Bank and IMF (Stiglitz, 2002). The new Good Governance approach was created and offered by international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the UN and the EU to promote local, sustainable, eco-friendly development and participative democracy and social welfare with active citizenship. The aim of the study is to show that the classical claim about the CSR could be revisited and seen as an insufficient theoretical framework to explain the complex situation. Marxist semiotic discourse analysis provides a rich theoretical framework to figure out the role and position of CSR theory and practices in the new state of affairs. The terms primitive capital accumulation as the source of migration flux from the underdeveloped countries to the industrially developed ones, the contradiction between capital and nature as the source of the ecological crisis, have been introduced for the first time within this theoretical framework in an attempt to explain the CSR’s new meaning.