Ideias do presente, práticas do passado? Elites empresariais e a questão social no Brasil e na Argentina: estudo comparativo sobre discursos e práticas de responsabilidade social empresarial

Abstract

This study has as its objective a comparative analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Brazil and Argentina, representing hypothesis-generating research of a particularising nature. The research seeks to create a historical and conceptual focus for the understanding of the phenomenon within the social sciences area. On the one hand, inserting it on a long term diachronic range of perception whose fulcrum is the behaviour of the corporate elites vis-a-vis the State and other civil society groups within what is known as the social question. On the other, reducing it in a synchronic form in order to verify the presence of a political-symbolic variable that is characterised as a hegemonic dispute for a national project. Based upon social relations of conflict, such a dispute is simultaneously both a product and production agent of the subject field itself and it is notable that the quality of the links generated in this flow of social relations is differentiated. Taking the work of the organisations that promote CSR as units of analysis, this study examines how such organisations functionalise and theorise their actions, the existence of the dispute in question and the national project that they design the nation as an imagined community based upon variables such as history, the concept of CSR, the perception of poverty and inequalities, understanding of the role of the State, of organised civil society, of businesses and executives. The sources of data come from a wide variety of media sources two influential national newspapers in particular from each of the studied countries data published on websites (proprietary and second-hand), participation in specialised events, personal interviews and printed publications