• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.52
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• pp.1-29
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• 2018

The notion of 'gift' is one of the effective and fruitful codes for understanding Western civilization. In this study, we will shed light on several meanings, especially by comparing among the three French philosophers that expressed interest in this notion: they are Mauss, Derrida and $Ric{\oe}ur$. Called "father of French ethnography", Mauss claims, in his famous article "Essay on the Gift", that the gift is paradoxically a kind of economic exchange dominated by three obligations: to give, receive, and return. But he strives to establish a moral theory based on the obligation to give. Under the influence of Mauss, Derrida deconstructs the theory of Mauss by devoting attention to 'time', one of the determining elements in studies on the gift. Derrida observes that the gift is established just at the extremely short moment of emergence of the act of giving and that this act is transformed into an economic exchange with passing of time. From it, the impossibility of the gift is derived despite its concrete and real emergence and existence. Under the influence of Mauss, $Ric{\oe}ur$, for his part, is interested in the notion of giving as part of the dialectic between 'love' and 'justice'. According to him, whereas justice is dominated by the economy of gift, namely the logic of equivalence, love, by the logic of 'superabundance'. He focuses on establishing 'Supra-ethics' by considering the fact that the gift is at the core of his religious and philosophical vision. Finally, let us point out that in $Ric{\oe}ur$, this notion of gift ('don') is closely linked to forgiveness ('pardon'), that holds in it the secret of understanding regarding the 'fallible' and 'capable' man.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.30
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• pp.31-51
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• 2013

In this paper, I approach corporate social responsibility as a discourse metadiscursively shaping the social relationship between corporations and society. Using a discourse-centered approach to culture, I examine how early discussions (involving legal disputes) on the rights of corporations to give evolved into a public sphere discussion as to how corporations can be viewed and redefined as social actors with capabilities to perform socially meaning actions, which here is "responsibility." I discuss how corporate social responsibility currently operates as a metadiscourse of corporate personhood, ethics, and corporate citizenship. Then, using insights from Mauss, I analyze how corporate social responsibility might be comparable to a Maussian gift exchange. Corporate social responsibility actions that are performed, indeed, are gift exchanges in that they involve the ideology of the free gift and the implicit expectation of a return to the giver. In the meantime, I argue, that in the case of corporate social responsibility, it is not the act of giving gifts (e.g., grants) that can lead to social alliances but rather the talk of gift giving, a departure from the ceremonial gift exchanges observed by Mauss. That is, here, the talk of giving shapes social alliances, thus displacing this function from the act of giving itself. The PR strategies deploy talk of the gift as a metapragmatic strategy, inviting various forms of role alignment on the part of diverse, potential and actual, participants, in a framework of corporate-sponsored gift exchange in which potential recipients compete, again at the level of metapragmatic description, to become the chosen gift recipient.