Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 27, 2016

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting

Considering the Power of “Social” in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
Power as Enabling Pre-Condition for Meaningful CSR in Alabama’s Poultry Industry

This paper was presented as a workshop session and considers how preexisting contexts of power inhibit or enable firm corporate social responsibility actions when the issue is a hotly contested social and political issue: immigrant labor in the American South. This research examines the impact of the passage and implementation of the 2011 Alabama Immigration Law on the state’s poultry processing industry through a discourse and content analysis. By using an adaption of Clegg’s Circuits of Power theory, the intersection of economic identity and political influence of the state poultry industry is analyzed within the power flows of Alabama’s economic network. This work is part of a broader study and contributes to CSR literatures through a focus on the role of pre-existing conditions of power on firm effectiveness in achieving CSR outcomes.