The Elephant in the Room: The Nascent Research Agenda on Corporations, Social Responsibility, and Capitalism

Sometimes it is helpful to stop and remind ourselves of the context in which a field of study started, and to sense-check on where it is going in relation to that starting place.The role of business in society has attracted considerable research interest over the past decades.Next to themes such as sustainability, social entrepreneurship, multistakeholder initiatives, and business ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a prominent domain in it its own right within management and organizational research.It is our intention in this special themed section to kick start the reconsideration of the socioeconomic context of CSR's starting place, broadly speaking capitalism, and to develop a more nuanced understanding of CSR in the contemporary neoliberal political economy.CSR as a modern management practice emerged in the United States as a strategic response to the New Deal and its wide reaching impact on the laissez faire approach to capitalism which had previously led to the economic crisis