Tobacco Industry Use of Corporate Social Responsibility Tactics as a Sword and a Shield on Secondhand Smoke Issues

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility has become a potential path to legitimacy and improved public relations for both companies that produce mainstream products and those that sell vice, such as the tobacco industry. Since the early 1990s, the tobacco industry has sought to bridge the gap between the public perception it has earned as a merchant of death and its goal of gaining corporate legitimacy and normality by promoting programs, positions, and policies it hopes the general public will believe are aimed at preventing or mitigating some of the societal ills that smoking causes, such as youth smoking. There is, however, an intractable problem that corporate social responsibility efforts can mask but not resolve: the tobacco industry’s products are lethal when used as directed, and no amount of public relations or funding of ineffective youth smoking prevention programs can reconcile that fundamental contradiction with ethical corporate citizenship. The focus of this study is to better understand the tobacco industry’s corporate social responsibility efforts and to assess whether there has been any substantive change in the way it does business with regard to the issue of exposure to secondhand smoke.