“A bulletin board of dreams”: corporate empowerment promotion and feminist implications

2017

Bus. Ethics Q.

ABSTRACT:Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them ‘from’ or ‘to.’ Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR.

Section: Problematising Empowerment: Insights From Ghanamentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Women’s Empowerment Through Csrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Re-thinking Empowerment In Csr: Feminist Foucauldian Insightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Empowering Women Through Corporate Social Responsibility: A Feminist Foucauldian Critique

2017

Bus. Ethics Q.

“…Neoliberalized feminism legitimizes ‘the same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has sustained gender‐based inequality and oppression’ (Roberts, , p. 209) as it emphasizes corporate growth and individual — above collective — advancement. Tornhill (, p. 541) argues that corporate adoptions of feminism ‘tend to be implicated in the very replacement of politics’. This is important as it suggests that feminism in the modern era has become toothless: depoliticized, co‐opted by corporate interests and lacking an understanding of the structural elements of women's oppression (and potential for emancipation) (Dean, ; Eisenstein, ).…”

Section: The Neoliberalization Of Feminism and The Rise Of Corporationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Concurrently, a growing number of studies have both praised (Karam & Jamali, ; McCarthy & Muthuri, ) and venerated (Pearson, ; Roberts, ) approaches to gender equality led by corporations through CSR. Praise herein tends to focus on ways in which CSR initiatives can help individual women in economic terms (Dolan & Scott, ), although even these claims are increasingly contested in the literature regarding the experiences of the women ‘beneficiaries’ of such initiatives (McCarthy, , forthcoming; Tornhill, , ).…”

Section: The Neoliberalization Of Feminism and The Rise Of Corporationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining new feminist futures: How feminist social movements contest the neoliberalization of feminism in an increasingly corporate‐dominated world

Grosser

Gender Work & Organization

2018

Increasingly it is argued that feminism has been co-opted by neoliberal agendas: becoming more individualistic and losing touch with its wider social change objectives. The neoliberalization of feminism is driven in part by increased corporate power, including the growing role of corporations in governance arenas, and corporate social responsibility agendas. However, we turn to social movement theory to elucidate strategies that social movements, including feminist social movements, are adopting in such spaces. In so doing, we find that feminist activists are engaging with new political opportunities, mobilizing structures and strategic framing processes that emerge in the context of increasingly neoliberal and privatized governance systems. We suggest that despite the significant challenges to their agendas, far from being co-opted by neoliberalism, feminist social movements remain robust, existing alongside and developing new strategies to contest the neoliberalization of feminism in a variety of innovative ways.

Empowering Women through Corporate Social Responsibility: A Feminist Foucauldian Critique

Issues in Business Ethics

2023

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women's empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women's empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them 'from' or 'to.' Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR.