Framing Capitalism: A Spectrum of Critique of Corporate Behaviour

This paper presents results from a three-year research project comparing case studies of moral challenge to corporate behaviour in the US and UK. Each case involved a different constellation of actors: from activists targeting high finance at Occupy Wall Street to corporate social responsibility professionals trying to change everyday practices within their own organisations. Using a qualitative dataset drawn from documentary sources and interviews with key players in each case of challenge I carry out a frame analysis. This methodology, found mainly in the field of social movement studies, enables the identification of a range of worldviews (i.e. interpretative frames) that are culturally available to those who seek to criticise transnational corporations. In these cases the identification of frames is useful for two reasons. First, it offers a systematic understanding of the ideological range of critique of corporations. While the range is broad, each frame has in common its reference to a long-standing view of corporations as institutions motivated by profit and instrumental rationality that, as a result, can easily tend towards irresponsible and immoral behaviour. Second, the variability between frames can be related in hermeneutic fashion to a range of other features of the case studies compared. Frames offer not just a critique but also prescribe the terms of engagement by which challengers might attempt to change the behaviour of target organisations. Identification of frames helps explain the different paths taken from articulating initial challenges to distinct forms of corporate response.