Paper presented at the 1st International Workshop The Role of Business in Society and the Pursuit of the Common Good ESSEC BUSINESS SCHOOL / March 8-9, 2012 / Cergy (Paris), FRANCE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN BUSINESS AND SOCIETY – CSR AND ITS NEEDED CONTEXTUALIZATION 1 Marie-Laure DJELIC, ESSEC Business School, FRANCE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN BUSINESS AND SOCIETY – CSR AND ITS NEEDED CONTEXTUALIZATION Marie-Laure DJELIC http://www.essec.fr/professeurs/marie-laure-djelic ESSEC Business School PB50105, 95021 Cergy FRANCE E-mail: djelic@essec.fr Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a buzzword those days. The concept of CSR and its contemporary form and consequences have generated in the last few years a dense and rich literature (for a recent and exhaustive overview see Segerlund 2010, see also Gilbert et al. 2010, den Hond et al. 2007, Matten and Moon 2007, Acquier 2007, Crane et al. 2007, Chapple and Moon 2005, Garriga and Melé 2004). On the whole, this literature has focused upon the diffusion of organizational and/or institutional practices and processes characteristic, in one way or another, of the contemporary trend of corporate social responsibility – over the last forty years or so at the most. Hence, we have learnt about the diffusion of the practice of corporate and industry codes of conduct, about the (limited) expansion of socially responsible investment, or about the contemporary structuration and professionalization of an increasingly transnational field if not transnational community around this notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (consultants, non-governmental organizations or NGOs, international organizations, socially responsible funds and fund managers, civil society groups, etc….). The objective, in this paper, is to propose a re-contextualization of corporate social responsibility. This re-contextualization will go in two main directions. First, we underscore the powerful elective affinities between contemporary CSR on the one hand and neoliberal globalization and its governance on the other. It sometimes appears as if the notion of a social responsibility of firms or business is a new phenomenon. In fact, there might even be a temptation to associate causally this “new” development with contemporary globalization. Naturally, the notion of a social responsibility of economic actors and organizations is not new. Hence, we also underscore the need for a second