La RSE comme instrument de gouvernance d’entreprise : une application à l’industrie française des télécommunications

Abstract

By combining works on the “new firm” (Zingales, 2000) and recent analyses on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), this paper shows that firms are now using CSR as an instrument of corporate governance. We confirm this instrumental vision of CSR by an empirical study of French telecommunications industry. Based on the analysis of official reports and semi-directive interviews of CSR managers of the four French telecoms operators, we advance that CSR is developed to apply formal and informal mechanisms of corporate governance, complementary to those of the shareholder model, in order to maintain added value-creative employment and subcontracting relationships.

Keywords

• corporate governance
• corporate social responsibility
• human capital
• boundaries of the firm
• French industry of telecommunications