Learning ‘social responsibility’ in the workplace: Conjuring, unsettling, and folding boundaries

This article proceeds from the argument that while the discourse of social responsibility (SR) is increasingly evident in pedagogies circulating through the workplace, its actual practices tend to be obscured beneath complex tensions and moral precepts presented as self-evident. Through an examination of individuals’ learning of SR in the workplace contexts of small enterprise, this discussion asks: How can we consider social responsibility in work, and the project of learning social responsibility in and for work, in more flexible ways that account for its complex enactments in pluralist contexts? The article explores dynamics of responsibility as both response and identity within literature on social responsibility in the workplace, and examines the process of learning SR as a matter of negotiating boundaries to enact response and identity. Drawing from findings of a qualitative study of 25 small enterprise owners engaging a process of learning SR practice, the article explores what are argued to be their boundary practices of conjuring, unsettling and folding boundaries as they developed viable locations and relations of social responsibility in their unique situations. Introduction The discourse of corporate social responsibility (SR), which is becoming pervasive among private and public sector organisations, can be viewed as a rather powerful set of pedagogies in the workplace. Various textual declarations are circulating such as the “CAUX principles” intended to guide workplace practice (Hopkins, 2003). Different instruments have been generated for organizations to measure their own and their suppliers’ SR performance standards (ILO, 2006; Verite, 2006). SR practices, or at least claims of SR, increasingly can be found in organizations’ annual reports and promotional materials; SR consultants and special product suppliers have emerged to assist work organizations to become more socially and ecologically responsible; and consumer demands for socially responsible practices have escalated (CBSR, 2001; Joyner & Payne, 2002; McWilliams et al., 2006). However, despite the apparent presumption that SR practice will somehow flower through the influence of these various texts, teachings, audits and exhortations, it is unclear how SR practice in work organizations actually develops. Complicating the question is, rather obviously, the troublesome connection of social responsibility with business where logics of production and market conflict with those of altruism and the common good. Social responsibility itself is not at all a straightforward ideal, and deserves some critical challenge to unsettle certain sedimented virtues and naturalized assumptions about what constitutes responsibility and ‘the good’ to which it is directed. With an interest in these complications and taking as its basic assumption that everyday practice in the workplace is an important site for learning, this article focuses on the processes through which work organizations and workers actually learn to negotiate the complexities and tensions of SR practice. How can we consider the project of learning to practice social responsibility in and for work? And how can we consider this learning in more flexible ways that account for its complex enactments in pluralist contexts? These questions are explored through dilemmas experienced by people striving to learn how to ‘do’ social responsibility in their work, dilemmas which emerged in a qualitative study of SR practice in the workplace.