Again "The Sicilian Mafia" instead of the ashkenazi/zionist mafia

[imsamhi]

organized crime = organizational crime
pdf, 25 pages
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nubs/ICCSR/ ... load&id=32

No. 48-2007 ICCSR Research Paper Series – ISSN 1479-5124
Investigating Instrumental Corporate Social Responsibility through the Mafia Metaphor
Jean-Pascal Gond, Guido Palazzo & Kunal Basu
International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
Nottingham University Business School
2007
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/ICCSR


High percentage of ashkenazis in the footnotes (Kotler, Siegel, Kramer) - and again we find an Orwelian use of "The Sicilian Mafia" instead of the ashkenazi/zionist mafia.



Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the instrumental perspective on
corporate social responsibility by relying on sociological analyses of a well known
organization: the Sicilian Mafia. Legal businesses might share features of the Mafia,
such as the propensity to exploit a governance vacuum in society, a strong culture that
demarcates the inside from the outside, and an extreme form of the profit motive.
Instrumental CSR has the power to accelerate a firm's transition to Mafia status
through its own pathologies. Lessons for future CSR research are derived, with specific
emphasis on understanding a firm's social embeddedness, acknowledging limitations in
regulating corporate behaviour in the global economy, and most critically, the risk of
viewing CSR simply as a means rather than as an end.




Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the instrumental perspective on
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), relying on sociological analyses of a well known
organization: the Sicilian Mafia. As postulated by Friedman (1962), an instrumentalist
view of CSR justifies socially responsible behaviours solely on economic grounds, that
is, considers such to be appropriate only when their underlying motivation is the
attainment of superior financial performance (see Vogel, 2005). Focussing on strategic
manoeuvring and the use of appropriate marketing tools, instrumental CSR is
synonymous with profit maximization (Garriga & Melé, 2004), and seen to be gaining
currency under the current climate of corporate scrutiny (e.g. Lee & Kotler, 2005;
Maignan & Ferrell, 2003; McWilliams & Siegel, 2001; McWilliams, Wright & Siegel,
2006; Porter & Kramer, 2002, 2006).
Corrupt organizations that collapse in financial scandals or multinationals that are
notorious for systematic violations of human rights or collaboration with repressive
regimes might be viewed similarly to organizations such as the Mafia. Indeed, as
argued by Gerber (2000), there is no fundamental distinction between organized crime
and organizational crime. Instead, a very thin borderline separates the normal
behaviours of illegal and immoral organizations (such as the Mafia) and the illegal and
immoral behaviours of normal and legitimate business firms. Further, in the extreme,
adoption of an instrumentalist view of CSR could even qualify certain activities of the
Mafia as being socially responsible. A corrupt but legal firm and the Mafia might be
seen as quite similar, sharing an extreme profit motive with significant overlaps in
organizational cultures. The metaphor of the Mafia might in fact highlight potential
moral pathologies that are embedded in mainstream economic theory and management
behaviours (see Ferraro, Pfeffer & Sutton, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005; Pfeffer, 2005).
Further, as the example of Enron demonstrates, the status of a corporation could
change from "most admired" to "most despised", thereby rendering possible the
metamorphosis of a business firm into a Mafia in terms of its intrinsic character.
Current discussions on the new Russian Robber Barons show that such a
metamorphosis might occur even in the reverse (Rawlinson, 2002), whereby a despised
firm comes to be admired in society.
The Mafia has mainly been portrayed as evil in the management literature or as the
extreme antithesis of an ethical organization. For instance, Husted (1998) invokes the
Mafia in evaluating the ethical constraints of trust, whereas Gallager and Goodstein
(2002: 439) or Wood, MacDermott and Swan (2002) refer to it in describing the
limitations of certain business practices such as partnerships. However, such
references avoid a full analysis of the Mafia in organizational terms and succeed in
reducing it to utter irrelevance (e.g., Colle & Gonella, 2002; Wood et al., 2002). In
contrast to the above, we suggest analysing the Mafia, both as a metaphor and as a
particular organizational form, investigating the Sicilian Mafia in particular to draw
inferences regarding socially responsible behaviour. Following Gambetta (1993), one
might consider the Mafia as a 'business' dealing in a very specific commodity: the
protection of people. In societies with inadequate governance and/or a low level of
mutual trust (e.g., underdeveloped or emerging economies characterized by 'weak
states'), both parties involved in a market transaction might opt for mafia protection as
guarantee, investing it thus with the role of a profit making intermediary. Gambetta's
(1993) analysis clearly highlights the economic and managerial mechanisms underlying
the Mafia's functioning and its relevance to known forms of business behaviours.
In addition to invoking the Mafia metaphor (Morgan, 1980) to capture certain
dimensions of modern corporations and their actions related to social responsibility, our
analysis might also point at weaknesses inherent in the functionalist and positivist
strain of CSR research (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007). Not only does the latter, culminating
in an instrumentalist view of CSR, parrot the limited logic of economic theory, it might
by the same token even enshrine the Mafia as a socially responsible organization.
The aim of the paper is to outline some the potential pathologies of instrumental CSR
by linking together two streams of research: the sociological and historical analysis of
the Sicilian Mafia (relying primarily on the work of Diego Gambetta, 1993, as well as
the recent literature on organized and organizational crime) to contemporary discourse
on the nature and value of instrumental forms of Corporate Social Responsibility (e.g.
Kotler and Lee, 2005; McWilliams et al., 2006; critically: Vogel, 2005).
The paper is organized as follows: first, we parallel Mafia and business corporations to
demonstrate that the former could serve as a powerful metaphor to analyze corporate
deviances as well as describe an organizational type that a corporation might
metamorphose into under given contexts. These premises are next explored to reveal
shortcomings of instrumental CSR. Finally, we discuss some key lessons that could be
learned from analyzing the Mafia for purposes of enriching organizational research on
CSR.
The Mafia and the Corporation: Paralleling Two
Organizational Forms