Engaging employees in CSR: A managerial masterplot for the good employee

We investigate how employees in an international conglomerate are persuaded to engage in pro-social practices as a means of implementing a strategy of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Because the aspects of power and pedagogy in employee engagement are little understood, we combine Bourdieu’s (1990) practice theory and his concepts of field, habitus, capital and pedagogy with a focus on the function of narratives in managerial persuasion and employee responses, to understand how participation in CSR activities is modelled by management and responded to by employees. As we show, employees’ responses to the CEO’s ‘masterplot’ (Abbott 2003) of ‘doing good’ range from resisting it to entriloquizing
(Cooren 2012) it.