Social Movements and Failed Institutionalization: Corporate (Non)Response to the AIDS Epidemic

14 A consequence of globalization is that the nation-state becomes too big to solve the small problems and too small to solve the big ones, as Daniel Bell has remarked. The same might be said of the contemporary multinational corporation (MNC). As MNCs have grown in size and influence in recent decades, they have faced growing demands to assume greater responsibility for solving social problems large and small. Corporations are expected to provide safe products for their consumers, decent working conditions for their employees, and to police the ethical standards of their suppliers and even the countries where they operate. More recently, MNCs have been asked to address global problems that would have previously been seen as the responsibility of governments , such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the looming crisis of climate change. Such problems outstrip the capacities of individual states to respond effectively. They require a collective response, from governments and from transnational actors such as corporations. Yet demands to address broad social problems challenge conceptions of what a corporation is for, and to whom it owes a responsibility. How are we to understand corporate responses to demands for greater responsibility in addressing global problems? In this chapter, we argue that organizational institutionalism and social movement theory offer complementary insights to address what we might call 'collective corporate social responsibility.' Collective corporate social responsibility (CCSR) is the concept that organizations in a sector or field are perceived to owe an obligation to certain constituencies. These obligations can vary across fields and over time. For example, businesses head-quartered in Minneapolis are expected to