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Introduction
In the last 30 years there have been a number of important innovations in the management of social and environmental issues by companies. At the heart of these has been the development of social and environmental reporting as a complement to traditional financial reporting, supported in some instances by new forms of corporate engagement with stakeholders. Despite their seeming promise, in recent years empirical studies of these new processes have begun to cast doubt on their efficacy as mechanisms for change in corporate practice (Ball et al., 2000; Owen et al., 2000, 2001; Thomson and Bebbington, 2005; Cooper and Owen, 2007). Specifically a number of authors have pointed to various forms of what they term “managerial capture”. Initially managerial capture was considered in relation to the limited scope of audited verification of new forms of social reporting (Ball et al., 2000). However, the concept of capture has subsequently been extended to characterise the highly selective nature of corporate engagement with stakeholders, and the control by management of the agenda and dialogue with stakeholders. The absence of binding corporate commitments to the outcomes of such processes, and the apparent divorce of these processes from corporate decision making is taken as evidence of the “success” of managerial capture.
Growing evidence of managerial capture has led some critics to suggest that corporate engagement is ineffectual (Tinker and Gray, 2003). Others, however, have suggested that disengaging for fear of capture may strip social and environmental accountability (SEA) research of any influence. As Parker (2005, p. 856) writes:
The risk for SEA scholars is that preoccupation with avoiding SEA capture, may sentence their discourse to be confined to the halls of academe and thereby distance them from any significant influence on whatever institutionalisation of SEA occurs.
Shenkin and Coulson (2007) suggest that improving corporate accountability requires academics to engage in more radical forms of activism instead of procedural forms of engagement. On the other hand, Adams and Larrinaga‐Gonzalez (2007) believe procedural forms of engagement are still necessary. While capture potentially leads to the failure of engagement, they believe that it is only through engagement research that we can further understand the nature of capture. The authors point out that (p. 339):… if we want to...