This chapter introduces the concept of CPR and gives a high-level overview of the chapters to follow. It also defines key terms, presents some background statistics on political spending over time, and offers an initial discussion of the extent to which business has captured the political process.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) assume political responsibilities by contributing to national and global governance, influencing their legal and moral environments, and addressing sustainability issues. Scholars have developed various frameworks, most prominently corporate political activity (CPA), corporate citizenship (CC), political corporate social responsibility (PCSR), and corporate political responsibility (CPR), for theorizing the political role and responsibility of the corporation. This chapter analyzes the challenges of MNCs, advances their political responsibility, and explores the implications for theorizing about human resource management (HRM). We propose HRM should be extended to include a political agenda along two functions: as a “steward” taking care for the wellbeing of the firm’s work force and as an “enabler” making organizational members competent for helping others. On that basis, we offer a perspective on how political HRM can be conceived of in the CPR approach and contribute to its development.

1. To explain the significance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the MNE context.

2. To illustrate the linkages between strategy and CSR in contemporary MNE business practice.

3. To examine how CSR applied by MNEs can improve labour standards.

4. To develop an understanding of the trade-off between maximizing MNE profits in the short run and fulfilling obligations to society.

5. To clarify that there is no ‘one size fits all’ CSR approach across all types of economies (developed, emerging, and least-developed) and all types of MNE administrative heritage, and that there can be various patterns of CSR capability building.

Since the 1990s, notions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been shaped by the global diffusion of citizenship practices and the advent of a corporate sustainability community that encourages firms to improve their environmental and social performance.These understandings of CSR have recast corporate responsibility away from a liability model to one that places a moral obligation on firms to address the societal ills connected to global markets.We analyse the CSR reports of large German and US firms published from the mid-1990s to 2013 to gauge how multinational firms’ understandings of their obligations have evolved in light of this changing normative environment.We find that many firms have expanded how they define their responsibilities, but these global CSR norms have been grafted onto nationally determined notions of to whom corporations are responsible and on what basis. Despite these national differences, firms in both countries have engaged more substantively with environmental than social sustainability and are more likely to describe their responsibilities for the environment in terms of an ethics of care.

The modern corporation is a creature of law and this chapter emphasises the consequences of taking a ‘real entity’ view of its functioning in that context. It does this in respect to examining the notion of ‘corporate responsibility’ in a period where shareholder primacy is considered the single authoritative rationale compelling corporate governance. But can corporate governance be considered more widely than this, and what would such a widening of the ambit of corporate governance mean for the notion of responsibility in respect to the modern corporation? The argument is that the kind of ‘personhood’ the company is in law does not lend itself to being held responsible in the same manner as ordinary citizens: corporate citizenship is very different to personal citizenship. However, the chapter pursues the political consequences of taking this non-ethical account of responsibility in various contexts. In particular, it examines how the governance of the multinational corporation might be reformulated to better enable it to be held responsible for any misconduct in the operation of its business activities as these increasingly spread across international boundaries.