Corporate social responsibility as cultural meaning management: a critique of the marketing of ‘ethical’ bottled water

To date, the primary focus of research in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been on the strategic implications of CSR for corporations and less on an evaluation of CSR from a wider political, economic and social perspective. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by critically engaging with marketing campaigns of so-called ‘ethical’ bottled water. We especially focus on a major CSR strategy of a range of different companies that promise to provide drinking water for (what they name as) ‘poor African people’ by way of Western consumers purchasing bottled water. Following Fairclough's approach, we unfold a three-step critical discourse analysis of the marketing campaigns of 10 such ‘ethical’ brands. Our results show that bottled water companies try to influence consumers' tastes through the management of the cultural meaning of bottled water, producing a more ‘ethical’ and ‘socially responsible’ perception of their products/brands. Theoretically, we base our analysis on McCracken's model of the cultural meaning of consumer goods, which, we argue, offers a critical perspective of the recent emergence of CSR and business ethics initiatives. We discuss how these marketing campaigns can be framed as historical struggles associated with neo-liberal ideology and hegemony. Our analysis demonstrates how such CSR strategies are part of a general process of the reproduction of capitalist modes of accumulation and legitimation through the usage of cultural categories

Cultural Activism and the Politics of Place-Making

In this paper, we explore the relationship between creative practice, activism and urban place-making by considering the role they play in the construction of meaning in urban spaces. Through an analysis of two activist groups based in Stokes Croft, Bristol (UK), we argue that cultural activism provides new political prospects within the wider context of global capitalism through the cultivation of a shared aesthetics of protest. By cultivating aspects of shared history and a mutual enthusiasm for creative practice as a form of resistance, Stokes Croft has emerged as a ‘space of nurturance’ for creative sensibilities. However, we note how Stokes Croft as an autonomous space remains open-ended and multiple for activists interested in promoting different visions of social justice

Refusing the terms of non-existence, breaking their constraints : John Holloway, cracking capitalism and the meaning of revolution today

This essay seeks to contribute to theorizing the (anti) politics of refusal of the material and abstract limitations imposed by the non-existence of life under capitalism, with special reference to the work of John Holloway, and his recent concept of ‘the crack’, the radical confluence of resistant subjectivity and a radically different mode-of-doing. The essay seeks to conceptualize a negative ontology, the standpoint of critique and resistant subjectivity, negativity toward the given, the existent and ‘that which is’. The essay attempts to show that in this active ‘doing’ – what Marx identified as ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen) or creative human essence – human beings choose to do other than what is demanded by money and power, which is itself the re-appropriation of doing. The essay seeks to be one such contribution in that direction

Globotopia: The Antiglobalization Movement and Utopianism

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