Giving with one hand : on the mining sector’s treatment of indigenous stakeholders in the name of CSR

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the political dimensions in the relationships between mining companies and their aboriginal stakeholders in Australia. Practical applications of stakeholder approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR) can overlook indigenous people at the local level of those who are most affected by mining. Informed by critical discourse analysis, the paper reports on a critical web-based study that synthesises disparate community and business perspectives to explore the representations of CSR relationships between mining companies and aboriginal stakeholders. Through their rhetorical manipulation of the CSR discourse, mining companies construct a homogeneous representation of aboriginal peoples, for strategic purposes. Companies maintain a public image as good corporate citizens, while using the rhetoric to divert their CSR activities to less problematic indigenous groups, thus ignoring the claims of stakeholders who are more directly affected by mining. While web-based research of CSR relationships can incorporate disparate perspectives to reveal the critical complexities of the relationships, the resultant interpretations cannot be conclusive. Thus more comprehensive on-site ethnographic fieldwork is required, and the web-based studies can be used to identify issues and contradictions to be investigated in the field. This critical evaluation of the CSR relationships between mining companies and their indigenous stakeholders offers an independent appreciation of those relationships and the political nuances in them. The paper provides evidence of the corporate appropriation of the CSR discourse for corporate image-enhancing purposes and shows how the mining companies adopt this approach in their practice of the CSR rhetoric.