摘要：Objectives. We examined Philip Morris USA’s exploration of corporate social responsibility practices and principles and its outcome. Methods. We analyzed archival internal tobacco industry documents, generated in 2000 to 2002, related to discussions of corporate social responsibility among a Corporate Responsibility Taskforce and senior management at Philip Morris. Results. In exploring corporate social responsibility, Philip Morris executives sought to identify the company’s social value—its positive contribution to society. Struggling to find an answer, they considered dramatically changing the way the company marketed its products, apologizing for past actions, and committing the company to providing benefits for future generations. These ideas were eventually abandoned. Despite an initial call to distinguish between social and economic value, Philip Morris ultimately equated social value with providing shareholder returns. Conclusions. When even tobacco executives struggle to define their company’s social value, it signals an opening to advocate for endgame scenarios that would encourage supply-side changes appropriate to the scale of the tobacco disease epidemic and consistent with authentic social value. Corporate legitimacy, the public’s general perception that a company’s actions are consistent with shared norms of appropriate behavior, enables corporations to maintain their operating licenses and status as publicly sanctioned institutions. 1,2 When public approval is threatened, reduced, or withdrawn, however, a legitimacy crisis occurs: a corporation’s practices become something to be addressed and perhaps modified significantly in response. 2 As delegitimation of the tobacco industry and denormalization of tobacco use reconfigure the social meaning of tobacco, the tobacco industry faces legitimacy crises beyond those experienced intermittently by most other corporate entities. 2–7 In light of the deadly, addictive nature of its products and the tobacco industry’s now well-documented history of deceit, legitimacy crises may be particularly difficult for tobacco companies. 7 We examined executive deliberations at Philip Morris USA in 2000 to 2002 as the company’s leadership sought to restore legitimacy through a formal corporate social responsibility commitment. Struggling to reconcile responsibility principles with Philip Morris’s history and its products’ deadliness, these executives questioned the purpose and value of Philip Morris itself. Although previous studies have explored Philip Morris’s evolving interest in corporate social responsibility, 8–12 none have examined the internal processes by which a tobacco company tries to explicitly address its raison d’être. The evolution of this process at executive levels of the largest US tobacco company suggests that tobacco companies face not only ongoing external public relations concerns, but also internalized legitimacy struggles that may create openings for policy innovation to address the tobacco epidemic more effectively on the supply side.
