Toward Political Explanation of Change in Corporate Responsibility: Political Scholarship on CSR and the Case of Palm Oil Biofuels
从实用主义视角梳理企业社会责任的政治学术研究，探讨如何利用政治本体论将规范性和描述性研究转化为解释性分析，并以棕榈油生物燃料行业为例说明不同政治本体论立场对解释企业责任变迁的潜力与局限。
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recently conceptualized and studied as a political phenomenon. Most debates in this scholarship have thus far focused on normative issues. Less attention has been paid to the explanatory potential of CSR research grounded in political theory and philosophy. In this article, we conduct a pragmatist reading of political scholarship on CSR and seek to deploy existing knowledge for research pursuing political explanation. We argue that the political ontologies that underlie scholarship on CSR can be used to transform normative and descriptive research also for explanatory uses. We show how ontologies vary in terms of potential research objects and scopes of political explanation, and argue that the main types of political-ontological stances adopted in scholarship on CSR, foundational and post-foundational stances, offer explanatory analysis of different schematic guidelines. Our pragmatist reading of previous research and an empirical case illustration of political explanation of change in corporate responsibility in the biofuel industry demonstrate the opportunities, limitations, and challenges different political-ontological commitments provide for political explanation.