Seminar – Jekyll and Hyde: Between Outrage and Optimism in Studying the Business-Society Interface in South Africa

Professor Ralph Hamann University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business

Ralph Hamann will draw on 20 years of studying Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and related themes in South Africa, focusing on recent publications and work with widely – perhaps wildly – diverging temperaments. In the critical register, they argue that CSR has been used as a smokescreen to mask deeper, exploitative organisational behaviours. So, while mining companies have been among the most prominent in making “corporate social investments” in health and education in neighbouring communities, such efforts were scant fig-leaves in comparison with a hundred years’ history of exploitative labour practices. More recent strategies to play a more positive role in community development have led to failure – in some instances, tragedy – because business-government interactions progressively dissipate the social responsibilities of both the government and business. In contrast to all this critique, they will then report on current work-in-progress, which explores why and how some corporations seek to build community resilience as a relatively novel strategic ambition that explicitly recognises their interdependence with social-ecological systems. Apart from these arguments themselves, they look forward to discussing how such widely varying registers might be possible – they might reflect different times, settings, or organisations, for instance, or they might merely reflect a split personality of the researcher.

Speaker bio

Ralph Hamann is Professor and Research Director at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, where he also directs the School’s PhD programme. His research and teaching is on why and how organisations create or address complex social-ecological problems. Rated an “internationally acclaimed” researcher by the National Research Foundation, he has published in diverse outlets including Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies. Among his other roles, he is an executive editor of Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development; South Africa lead at the Embedding Project (which received the inaugural International Impactful Collaboration Award from the Academy of Management), and is Co-Founder of the Southern Africa Food Lab (for which he received UCT’s Distinguished Social Responsiveness Award). He has held diverse visiting positions, most recently as Pearson Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship and Engineering at Brown University.

In collaboration with the CJBS Impact Forum.