Stakeholder Populism, Campaign GM, and the Economic Education of the Public

Populism does not sit well with corporate social responsibility because it tends to collapse all stakeholders into one group, “the people.” We consider an alternative relationship between populism and corporate social responsibility, which we capture in the notion of stakeholder populism. We show how, in a historically contingent time and place-the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States-a group of activist lawyers known as the Project on Corporate Responsibility posited themselves as representatives of “the people,” understood as the numerous stakeholders of the American corporation, and campaigned to impose socially responsible behavior on the management of General Motors (GM) and subsequently other large US corporations. Setting the Project against the broader mutations of postwar liberalism, we draw on new archival material to trace the making of Campaign GM and consider how this turning point in the history of corporate governance was also a catalyst for the regrouping of the business establishment and the strategic reorientation of its efforts toward the economic education of the public.

Read the full piece at SSRN.