Book Review: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism: Ethnographies of Norwegian Energy and Extraction Businesses Abroad, edited by Ståle Knudsen (2023). New York: Berghahn Books.

Do corporations act more responsibly when they are owned by a state that presents itself as a global humanitarian superpower? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism takes up this question through an ethnographic inquiry into how Norwegian energy and extractive companies enact corporate responsibility abroad. The contributors of this edited volume center the state to foreground what corporate social responsibility (CSR) does not only for the companies involved but also for their multiple publics: “host” and “home” states, local communities, and employees. As states worldwide expand their ownership of capital and increasingly assume the role of investor-shareholders, this collection provides a timely investigation into the ethical relationships between corporations, governments, and markets.

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capital is divided into two parts. The first delves into how corporate responsibility is imagined, understood, and mobilized within Norway, situating CSR within the “Nordic model” of tripartite cooperation between corporations, trade unions, and the state. Forged through labor-capital contestation and associated with values such as trust, egalitarianism, and consensus, the Nordic model has given rise to an implicit culture of CSR in Norwegian firms that is grounded in ethical conduct. The volume proposes a broader conception of corporate responsibility—one that extends beyond conventional understandings of CSR as a technique of neoliberal governance. Building on this background, the second section traces how these ideas travel around the world, as Norwegian state-owned and parastatal companies expand internationally, driven by surplus capital and limited domestic investment possibilities. Across a series of ethnographic case studies, each contribution demonstrates that these firms function as other transnational corporations do when operating abroad, prioritizing shareholder value while invoking CSR as a tool of legitimization. In this context, the Norwegian state functions as a largely passive owner that refrains from sanctioning the companies in which it holds stakes, underscoring that ownership structure alone reveals little about corporate behavior.

Part I begins with a methodological intervention, with Chapter 1 challenging conventional anthropological notions of “access.” Arguing for a flexible, multisited approach to research, Ingrid Birce Müftüoglu and colleagues propose that the frictions inherent in corporate ethnography—including “failure to access”—are themselves productive sites of knowledge. Chapter 2, co-authored by Oda Eiken Maraire and Isabelle Hugøy, traces the multiple understandings of corporate responsibility in Norway—from the locally embedded, culturally specific notion of samfunnsansvar (“societal responsibility”) to the global, business-oriented discourses of CSR. The co-existence of these two paradigms enables Norwegian corporations and government institutions to maneuver strategically in how they define and perform said versions of responsibility. In Chapter 3, Eldar Bråten’s historical ethnography of a Norwegian company town demonstrates that ideas of corporate responsibility in Norway long predate the formal emergence of CSR, and that this history shapes the particular forms the concept takes in the country today. The section concludes with Ståle Knudsen’s examination of aluminum producer Norsk Hydro, long lauded as a model of state ownership and responsibility. In recent years, however, the company’s increasing prioritization of shareholder value—reflected in its muted response to environmental and corruption scandals in Brazil, where the company operates major refining facilities—illuminates the contradictions of Nordic state capitalism abroad.

These tensions set the stage for the second part of the volume. Through seven case studies spanning four different corporations, the contributors investigate how corporate responsibility is enacted and negotiated beyond Norway. Collectively, the cases offer a mixed picture of the extent to which Norwegian firms have succeeded in exporting the Nordic model, often resulting in its selective, piecemeal, or opportunistic adoption. For the case of China, Emil Røyvrik shows how Norsk Hydro translated the principle of “workplace democracy,” which is central to the Nordic model, by establishing a joint cafeteria for both management and production workers, thus diverging from the standard Chinese practice of separating the two groups. Such initiatives to encourage collaboration across hierarchical lines were, however, only adopted once it became profitable to do so. Iselin Asedotter Strønen’s study of oil firm Equinor’s CSR project in the Campos Basin illustrates that the effort’s success owed more to the efforts of Brazilian regulators—who shaped and enforced it through compliance measures—than to Equinor or the Norwegian state. For the case of Tanzania, Siri Lange and Victoria Wyndham shed light on how Equinor’s use of gender-neutral language masked the reality that its social investments overwhelmingly benefited men. In the following chapter, Lange further shows that while Equinor helped establish a Tanzanian union branch, it simultaneously steered the union away from a radical model toward a more reformist kind—one that the company claimed would better reflect the Nordic model. In the case of hydropower firm Statkraft in Turkey, Ståle Knudsen and colleagues argue that the company’s approach to responsibility was almost entirely informed by international standards, not ones based on the Nordic model. Extending these dynamics to the domestic context, Ragnhild Freng Dale’s chapter on the Snøhvit liquified natural gas project examines how the Norwegian state increasingly acts as a passive owner that is more and more reluctant to use the allocation of oil and gas licenses to discipline corporate .

By shifting the focus from private, shareholder-driven Anglo-American corporations to state-owned and parastatal firms, this volume makes an important empirical contribution to anthropological studies of CSR, which have long overlooked the state. More broadly, it advances debates on state capitalism, showing how the blurring of public-private boundaries reshapes corporate and political responsibilities. At the same time, the volume’s dual focus—on both CSR and the Nordic model—introduces a degree of conceptual unevenness. While some chapters foreground CSR practices, others emphasize the Nordic model. Yet this shifting emphasis also reflects the complexity involved in tracing how corporate responsibility is interpreted across different contexts. Nevertheless, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism provides rich insight into how Norwegian state-owned corporations navigate multiple and often contradictory roles as profit-driven corporations, state actors, and ambassadors of “Nordic values.” In addition to anthropologists, the volume will also appeal to economic geographers, political economists, development studies scholars, and those practitioners engaged in the governance of extractive industries.