Within firms, the decision to engage in private policymaking and adopt a policy that self-regulates practices is rarely straightforward. As highlighted in Chapter 2, this is in part due to the difficulty firms have in judging the costs and benefits of either action or inaction. Although this specific problem makes applying the unitary rational actor standpoint to private politics difficult, those that adopt the model nonetheless argue that participating in private politics – specifically, by engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) – is harmful to firms and distracts management from its job. As mentioned previously, Milton Friedman was a strong advocate for this view, writing that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” (1962, 133). Echoing this sentiment forty-two years later, Peter Drucker stated in 2004 that “Corporate social responsibility is a dangerous distortion of business principles. If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast” (quoted in Bakan [2004, 35]).

A second view takes a more expansive view of a corporation's environment and argues that firms should take into account factors other than market forces when adopting specific policies, as well as long-term strategies. Although rejecting CSR as too ad hoc a framework, the worldwide managing director of the consultancy McKinsey & Company called upon large firms to take private policymaking more seriously when they formulate long-term strategies (I. Davis 2005).