Governmentality and CSR in Nigerian Banks
Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:43:00 BST
The Business School’s Emerging Markets Research Group (EMERGE) heard Dr Olu Aluko and Dr Eshani Beddewela from the University of Huddersfield Business School present their research on “Governmentality, Agency and Power: Implementing the Nigerian Sustainable Banking Principles”.
Olu, a Senior Lecturer in Business Strategy, and Eshani, a Lecturer in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have joined their efforts in a research project combining their research areas and as a result they have developed a paper which they presented to the EMERGE group earlier today.
As Olu and Eshani say “In recent times the government has emerged as an enabling and empowering facilitator promoting the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by businesses to leverage economic competitiveness and growth. While the analytics of governmentality provide us with an understanding of the neo-liberal modes of CSR governance, it requires further exploration of agency and power interactions during governance. Furthermore, the governmentality literature in general and political CSR literature in particular lacks empirical evidence from developing countries. This paper addresses these gaps by exploring the interactions between governments, businesses and other institutional actors, focusing on the manifestation of power and agency during the process of implementing a ‘soft’ regulatory initiative. Drawing on neo-institutional theory and governmentality literature, and using qualitative interview data, we theoretically examine how agency and power interactions could occur when governments and businesses interact to facilitative CSR interventions within a developing country context. We do this by examining a soft regulative initiative configuring a new CSR guideline for the banking industry in Nigeria. Our findings provide unique insights into how agency drives the initiation of governmentality when contextual factors provide an enabling environment to do so.”
Their research received a very positive feedback and encouragement to proceed further in defining the issue of soft power in CSR, not only in Nigeria but also in other emerging markets.
Professor John Anchor, Director of the Emerging Markets Research Group, says “so called political CSR has been well researched in developed economies but not in emerging markets. It was fascinating, therefore, to see how institutional context may affect corporate policy”.
