Should brands “nudge us for good”? Towards a critical assessment of neuro‐liberal corporate social responsibility

• Author: Sven Brodmerkel
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1898

ACADEMIC PAPER

Should brands “nudge us for good”? Towards a critical

assessment of neuro‐liberal corporate social responsibility

Sven Brodmerkel

Faculty of Society and Design, Bond

University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

Correspondence

Sven Brodmerkel, Faculty of Society and

Design, Bond University, Gold Coast, Qld

4229, Australia.

Email: sbrodmer@bond.edu.au

This article critically investigates the recent emergence of neuro‐liberal corporate

social responsibility (CSR). Neuro‐liberal CSR is inspired by libertarian paternalism, a

form of behavioural governance popularised by behavioural economist Richard Thaler

and legal scholar Cass Sunstein in their bestseller Nudge (2008). Libertarian paternal-

ism presumes humans to be “predictably irrational”due to hardwired cognitive biases

and thus advocates the design of policy interventions that use human psychology for

correcting these shortcomings in ways that benefit individuals and society. Although

the use of “nudging”interventions has been critically scrutinised in the context of

public policy, little attention has been paid to the adoption of libertarian paternalist

principles in the corporate world. This paper uses Nudging for Good, an initiative by

the European Brands Association (AIM), to illustrate how major corporations adopt

and frame corporate nudging as a new and purportedly highly effective form of

CSR. However, as this paper argues, neuro‐liberal CSR raises concerns regarding its

effectiveness, transparency, and its individualisation and de‐politicisation of social ills.

1|INTRODUCTION

Despite the attention corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR)

has received, particularly since the 1990s, it is still a malleable and

contested business practice and theoretical concept. It is malleable in

that its core proposition—that corporations have obligations to society

that extend beyond the mere profit motive (Godfrey & Hatch, 2007)—

has found expression in a broad range of activities including cause

marketing and commodity activism, social accounting and reporting,

and social innovation (Einstein, 2012; Fleming & Jones, 2013). And it

is contested with regard to the extent to which its ethical stance is

applied in its concrete practices and whether or not it can be realised

within the structure of a capitalist market society. Proponents of CSR

consider it to be an effective means for realising a conscious or “soft

capitalism”(Blowfield & Frynas, 2005) in which the interests of various

stakeholders—from shareholders to workers to the environment—can

be profitably reconciled. Others see CSR mainly as “aspirational talk”

(Christensen, Moring, & Thyssen, 2013) harbouring the potential to

commit corporations to socially responsible practices or simply as

“fluff”(Ingham, 2006, p. 284). For more sceptical accounts, though,

CSR mainly serves as a vehicle for deflecting attention away from

questionable business practices and for extending the competitive

logic of capitalist market competition into ever‐more aspects of social

life (Banerjee, 2008; Fleming & Jones, 2013; Hanlon & Fleming, 2009;

Shamir, 2004).

CSR is therefore best understood as a dynamic, diverse set of

business practices and an evolving “field of scholarship”(Crane,

McWilliams, Matten, Moon, & Siegel, 2008, p. 6). New approaches

to CSR continuously manifest themselves in response to changing

forms of governance, stakeholder demands, theories of consumer

behaviour, and technological innovations, requiring practitioners and

scholars to regularly re‐evaluate conceptual frameworks and norma-

tive assessments in relation to these new practical adaptations of

the core proposition of CSR.

One such new approach to CSR is what I call neuro‐liberal CSR.

Neuro‐liberal CSR embraces libertarian paternalism, a purportedly

“third way of governance”popularised by Nudge, a bestseller by Nobel

laureate Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008). Drawing on findings

from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural economics,

it suggests that humans are cognitive misers as a result of hardwired

heuristics and biases that systematically prevent people from making

“rational”decisions reflecting their authentic preferences. Libertarian

paternalists therefore encourage governments to design subtle market

interventions that counteract these irrationalities by going with the

Received: 12 October 2018 Accepted: 16 November 2018

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1898

J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1898.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1898

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of7