Our Business is the Common Good: Social Representations in the Speech of Socially Responsible Company

Abstract

The article discusses the results of a research about corporate social responsibility, whose central question was to comprehend how this social representation is organized, the ideological strategies that covers and which is its function in the actual phase of international capitalism. From the perspective of critical social psychology and frameworks of the theory of social representations and the critical concept of ideology, were analyzed eighty-six social reports of corporations indicated as corporate social responsibility models in Brazil, under the depth hermeneutics methodology. It was found the appropriation of social responsibility proposal by big national and multinational private corporations that, by means of ideological strategies of powerful social representations, construct in the society the image of common good agents. The speech disseminated through the media is linked to the practice of philanthropy, creating and strengthening relationships of dependence and reaffirming the project of neoliberal capitalism in its maneuvers of adaptation and reproduction.