Corporate social responsibility as corporate social control: The case of work-site health promotion

SummaryIn the past decades work-site health promotion has become an increasingly popular strategy through which corporations and other employers are said to exercise social responsibility. Not only does this practice promise better health and wellbeing for employees; it can also contribute to generating sustainable and responsible organizations. As with all organizational activities we need, however, critically analyze the potential risks for single individuals and societies alike with comprehensive health promotion programs. Any activity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can potentially be seen as an expression of organizational control through which all the more aspects of an organization's environment come to be enacted by the organization in a way favorable to the organization's aims and perspectives. By clothing an activity as “socially responsible”, and more specifically as “health promotion”, organizations may accomplish an essential task in a very sublime and efficient way: that of managing its environment in terms of desired and appropriate human behaviors. This unanticipated consequence of health promotion deserves attention in order to even better understand the potentials and pitfalls of modern CSR.