Drivers, Impacts, and Mitigation of Corporate Social Irresponsibility: An Environmental Injustice Perspective

Abstract Scholarly work on corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) has frequently focussed on incident-based narratives, with more recent studies exploring the complex interplay among various stakeholders and their involvement in perpetuating environmental injustice (EI). Focussing on the relationship between CSiR and EI, we examine the factors that increase the risk of CSiR occurrences, their impact on various stakeholders and related responses, and measures that can prevent or mitigate CSiR. These issues are investigated via means of media discourse analysis (MDA), developing thematic coding using data extracted from various sources in the public domain and available on the internet. Outcomes from the MDA identify a clear and perpetuating link between CSiR and different forms of EI—distributive injustice, procedural injustice, and recognitional injustice. Our findings contribute to the CSiR–EI literature by analysing the structural conditions that reveal and shape the visibility and perceptions of environmental harm; identifying media exposure as a threshold for stakeholder contestation; and offering a typology of CSiR–EI dynamics grounded in sectoral and geographic contexts.