Jean-Luc Moriceau, Géraldine Guérillot. Gifted : the monolingualism of corporate social responsibility. Revista de Administração de Empresas, 2012, 52 (2), pp.153 – 164.

Acts of Corporate Social Responsibility are more often than not presented as success-story narratives. A quasi-ethnographic study in Senegal pierces through the gloss to make such accounts tremble. First a computer donation from a Northern country is depicted within the usual plot and vocabulary. Then during a visit to a Senegalese rubbish dump the story starts to stutter, as countless questions surge about what is actually going on there, and about how we can know and represent (both as depiction and voice) it. A tipping moment in an interview serves to reveal the ambiguities of positions and the difficulties to voice the happenings with a different language. CSR language is described as a monolingualism, imposing a particular vocabulary and grammar on what is said or thought. This is a monolingualism of the other. Some of the consequences of this monolingualism are reviewed, with the conclusion of a need to make something happen to CSR language. More than one language is needed to speak of CSR.