Search results

This paper seeks to explore corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Brazil through the “evolution” of the sustainability concept in one of the country's leading specialist business publications – the Exame Magazine. The idea is to understand how Exame portrays sustainable development and corporate sustainability in its Sustainable Corporation Guide.

The authors collected material covering five years of the Exame Sustainable Corporation Guide, from 2005 to 2009. The data were analyzed using discourse analysis.

The authors consider that the “evolution” promoted in this particular business media discourse on CSR and sustainability assumes, and stands for the economically dominant paradigm. In this sense, it cannot be viewed as an alternative that can realistically protect local environments. Despite the idea of a neutral journalistic approach, the concerns depicted in the publication still rely on profits and the chase for business opportunities. The authors also discuss to what extent this particular publication supports a specific hegemonic discourse. The different sustainability indexes adopted only reproduce practices that are desired and that align with the realities of the so-called developed nations.

The paper focuses on what kind of sustainability discourse is propagated by the business media, and more specifically, by a well-known Guide published by a popular Brazilian business magazine. Through this method of diffusion, a specific kind of CSR and sustainability are drawn up that support the capitalist business model. This analysis can raise issues, such as the existence of a “dark side” of sustainability. Further investigation of the diffusion of the CSR and sustainability relationship in business media discourse, as well as of the uncritical adoption of western CSR models, might invigorate the discussion and provide valuable insights.

There is a distinct lack of studies on sustainability and CSR in emergent economies. Such initiatives can be developed in different ways because emergent countries' contexts may differ. Since Brazil is currently an important player in the economic and political arenas, understanding how the notion of sustainability is being discussed in the Brazilian business media can lead to important implications for corporate practices and organizational relationships with stakeholders, both internally as well as externally.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.