Governments are widely viewed by academics and practitioners (and society more generally) as the key societal actors who are capable of compelling businesses to practice corporate social responsibility (CSR). Arguably, such government involvement could be seen as a technocratic device for encouraging ethical business behaviour. In this paper, we offer a more politicised interpretation of government engagement with CSR where "CSR" is not a desired form of business conduct but an element of discourse that governments can deploy in structuring their relationships with other social actors. We build our argument through a historical analysis of government CSR discourse in the Russian Federation. Laclau and Mouffe's (Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics,Verso Books, London, 1985) social theory of hegemony underpins our research. We find that "CSR" in the Russian government's discourse served to legitimise its power over large businesses. Using this case, we contribute to wider academic debates by providing fresh empirical evidence that allows the development of critical evaluation tools in relation to governments' engagement with "CSR". We find that governments are capable of hijacking CSR for their own self-interested gain. We close the paper by reflecting on the merit of exploring the case of the Russian Federation. As a "non-core", non-western exemplar, it provides a useful "mirror" with which to reflect on the more widely used test-bed of Western industrial democracies when scrutinising CSR. Based on our findings, we invite other scholars to adopt a more critical, politicised stance when researching the role of governments in relation to CSR in other parts of the world.

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In 1988, Nahavandi and Malekzadeh suggested that differences between acquired and acquiring companies' cultures did not necessarily cause members of the former to evaluate the acquirers' cultures negatively. Although their work was widely cited, the questions of how members of acquired companies form their cultural evaluations and what drives the evaluation dynamics remain unexplored. We attribute this to the lack of a theoretical language in the acquisition literature for talking about the subjectivities of the people in the acquired companies and their understanding of cultures. In this paper, we extend Nahavandi and Malekzadeh's work by introducing a conceptualization of subjectivity based on a post-structuralist perspective, as constituted by various discourses in their environment. In three cases of acquired companies, we explore the discursive frames employees use to form their cultural evaluations, and the links between these discursive frames and the employees' accounts of immediate events, in order to understand the changes in cultural evaluations over time. The findings indicate (i) a temporal aspect in people's use of different discursive frames to construct their cultural evaluations, and (ii) that the shifts in the use of discursive frames lead to changes in cultural evaluations.

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The aim of this article is both a pronouncement of doom and an offer of hope for the Western business school. Both come from the recognition that business schools are haunted and that the haunting spectre is none other than the capitalist ideology. We ground our thinking in the established rich ‘ghostly’ academic literature where the metaphor of the ghost is used to reveal the powerful agency of the unspoken-of and the unseen. Using three fictional ghostly tales as interpretive lenses, we make three arguments. First, we argue that capitalism is a ghost in the walls of the business school. Second, we suggest that capitalism’s ghostly nature prevents the business school from offering a curriculum that serves more than the growth of financial capital. Third, we propose that naming of capitalism is integral to the exorcism of its ghost and the creation of curriculum that engages with the social and environmental challenges of our times.