Additional resource: Example of a sustainability report
As Barry mentions, CSR is a highly performative practice. This leads to the problem that Company's focus more on reporting requirements and on looking "ethical" through nicely crafted reports that are distributed to Stakeholders. Here is an example of a Sustainability report by Cerrejón, the coal corporation I always use as an example. If one reads the report without a critical eye, it sounds like the coal company is the enactment of ethical behaviour. Extractive industries companies usually publish this kind of reports yearly following the GRI reporting standard (https://www.globalreporting.org/information/about-gri/Pages/default.aspx). This makes reporting a widely standardized matter that might lead to further problems, such as the framing of what ethical behaviour is. As express in Barry's book:
As Michael Power (2007a) argues, there is a weakness in the idea that ethical conduct is best improved through communication of its performance to others: the danger is that businesses become preoccupied with reporting requirements, such that they behave ethically primarily for the sake of these reports. Indeed, the interests of business in demonstrating ethical conduct – by meeting standards and guidelines and making its commitment to corporate social responsibility public – may lead it to neglect those aspects of its conduct that cannot easily be measured or publicised, or that are not the subject of demands and expectations on the part of regulators, the legal system or even critics. At the same time, published accounts of ethical conduct may function as a way of defending businesses against criticism; while critics, in turn, can become preoccupied with the ethical performance of business as it comes to be defined by international standards." (Ch 4 - P 80)