Taming Wicked Problems: The Role of Framing in the Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility

• Published date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12137
• Date: 01 May 2016
• Author: Juliane Reinecke,Shaz Ansari

Taming Wicked Problems: The Role of Framing in the

Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility

Juliane Reinecke and Shaz Ansari

University of Warwick; University of Cambridge

ABSTRACT While scholars have explained how business has increasingly taken on regulatory

roles to address social and environmental challenges, less attention has been given to the

process of how business is made responsible for wicked problems. Drawing on a study of

‘conflict minerals’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we examine the process through

which companies became responsible for a humanitarian crisis. We contribute by: (1) bridging

insights from contentious performance and deliberative approaches – to present a model of

corporate political responsibilization for a wicked problem that explains how a ‘field frame’ of

responsibility can emerge; (2) explaining shifting boundaries between public and private

responsibilities and the changing role of the state as catalytic rather than coercive; and (3)

showing how responsibility can be attributed to a target by framing an issue and its root cause

in ways that allow such an attribution, and how the attribution can diffuse and solidify.

Keywords: conflict minerals, Congo, frames, human rights, political CSR, private regulation,

social movements, transnational governance

INTRODUCTION

Who is responsible for human rights violations, such as in the 2013 collapse of the

Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh, where over 1100 workers died? Is it local

factory operators flouting national laws, local governments failing to enforce these

laws, multinational retailers squeezing suppliers, Western consumers wanting cheap

goods, or the international community failing to intervene? The question of responsi-

bility attribution has been posed for many complex social issues, such as extreme pov-

erty, pandemics, and climate change, described as ‘wicked problems’ (Conklin, 2006;

Rittel and Webber, 1973) or ‘grand challenges’ (Ferraro et al., 2015). Wicked prob-

lems are large scale social challenges caught in causal webs of interlinking variables

spanning national boundaries that complicate both their diagnosis and prognosis. The

Address for reprints: Juliane Reinecke, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4

7AL, UK (Juliane.Reinecke@wbs.ac.uk).

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C2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 53:3 May 2016

doi: 10.1111/joms.12137

sheer magnitude and transnational scope of wicked problems in a globalizing world

has spurred calls for a multi-pronged governance approach, with particular attention

to companies and other private actors (George et al., 2012; Scherer and Palazzo,

2011).

While interpretations about what is public or private responsibility have shifted

over time (Davis et al., 2008), more recently, what Shamir (2008) calls an ‘age of

responsibilization’, new corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches have sought

change in the traditional role of business as ‘profit-only’ actor. In the political version

of CSR literature, businesses are seen to assume governance duties to solve major

societal ills amid the regulatory voids left by the retreating state (Scherer and Palazzo,

2011). Yet, corporations also exploit regulatory voids (e.g., Banerjee, 2008) as evi-

denced by the persistence of modern day slavery (Crane, 2013) and large-scale corpo-

rate tax avoidance.

More attention is thus warranted to understanding how and why some regulatory

voids become spaces for corporate intervention, while others are ignored or even

exploited by companies. While political CSR scholarship has enlightened us about

how regulatory voids have led to a political role for business, we know less about the

process of how business is made responsible for societal problems. We argue that

responsibility – the state of duty, accountability, and opportunity for action for an

issue (Newell, 2005) – is socially constructed through collective negotiation. It would

be productive to learn more about how interpretive shifts occur that prompt compa-

nies to rethink their socio-moral obligations for an issue of concern, how new modes

of corporate engagement emerge, and how the boundaries between public and private

responsibility get redefined.

Social movement scholars have demonstrated the influence of ‘contentious perform-

ance’ (Tilly, 2008) – civil society campaigns attacking companies for social and environ-

mental ills – in inducing corporate behavioural change (e.g., Davis et al., 2008; den

Hond and de Bakker, 2007; King and Pearce, 2010). However, scant attention is given

to the social process of constructing responsibility and moral engagement through which

companies may come to accept responsibility, rather than engage only in compliance or

manipulation to avoid sanctions and appear legitimate (Scherer et al., 2013). To under-

stand this process, we draw on the foundational work on framing (Goffman, 1974),

which explains how perceptions of social reality can be shaped. Snow and Benford

(1988, p. 199) identified three core framing tasks to generate collective action for an

issue; diagnosis, prognosis, and motivation. However, wicked problems complicate these

framing tasks (Lewicki et al., 2003). It may be unclear: (1) what the root cause is and

who the central villain is given that wicked problems are caught in complex causal webs;

(2) what the solutions might be given the problem’s ambiguity; and (3) how wider sup-

port is mobilized for implicating a new target in the problem given that prima facie its

link with the problem is unclear. Given these challenges, it is worth examining how com-

panies come to be responsibilized for a wicked problem.

To address these questions, we conduct a qualitative study of how companies

assumed responsibility for a wicked problem in the Democratic Republic of Congo,

described by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2009 as ‘a humanitarian crisis

of catastrophic dimensions’. Whereas companies initially resisted responsibilization,

300 J. Reinecke and S. Ansari

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C2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies