From the social to the environmental: the mobilization for corporate social responsibility in Brazil and Argentina through a comparative historical perspective

The attempt of the following article is to understand why the business community have assumed the control of the dissemination of discourses and practices of CSR in Brazil, while in Argentina the same has been done by the civil society. Thereby, apart from the comparative effort - always useful to indicate similarities and differences create scales and suggest generalizations - it is easy to have a comprehension about the existence of a gap while addressing the issue, which needs to be suppressed: a landmark construction regarding business action in relation to the social question. As a corollary, we intend to apprehend the contextual framework of meanings related to the term CSR in each national reality were they were analyzed, as well as pointing how this question have morphed from the social question, to the environmental one, taking into consideration the fact that, although being a global discourse, it is far from being homogeneous or undiversified.