From protagonists to partners: Participative research in the corporate landscape

A critical perspective on the corporate landscape, especially corporate social responsibility, can arguably shed light on the increasing tensions between different corporate stakeholders. For stakeholders in a corporation are now commonly taken to include, not only investors, but also customers, employees, business suppliers and the local community. The paper has three parts. The first part situates the notion of corporate social responsibility within corporatist culture, and points to developments in the global corporate landscape that are indicative of a contemporary societal mood calling for higher levels of accountability and responsibility from corporations. The second part analyses the oppressive nature of stakeholder relationships in the corporate landscape, tracing how the work of Freire, Gramsci and Foucault lends different understandings to these relations between stakeholders. The third part of the paper illustrates how participative action research might be used to unsettle oppressive regimes in the tourism industry in general, and the gambling sector of that industry, in particular. The conclusion proposes a type of action research that envisages participant stakeholders engaging in their own emancipatory project in the context of prevailing oppressive corporatist relations. The paper therefore proposes that participative action research may open up opportunities for unsettling the dominant assumptions of economically driven stakeholders in the exploration of complex, competing stakeholder interests. In such engagements lie the potential for a shift