The Mine Next Door
Turning Points in Corporate Social Responsibility Communicative Practice
How do corporations decipher their responsibility to the community?
Description
The Mine Next Door peels back the veneer of corporate public relations to expose the jagged edges that define the boundaries of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Minnesota’s Iron Range. With five years of ethnographic and archival research, Amy O’Connor was able to interview over seventy people, including miners, retired miners, community members, elected officials, and representatives from Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. In addition to illuminating the everyday lives of Minnesota’s taconite miners and community members, she compares the corporate narratives of CSR with these lived experiences to reveal how CSR boundaries are co-constructed, contested, and consequential.
In this rare ethnographic account of iron ore mining in the United States, O’Connor shows how turning points—whether macrolevel (e.g., capitalism, governmental policy, and regulation) or microlevel (e.g., miner experiences, local culture, company proclivities)—create CSR communicative practice boundaries that are influenced by culture, history, and geography. The permanence and precariousness of the mining industry offers a unique opportunity to show how corporations, workers, and communities both collaborate and clash. The Mine Next Door argues that to understand CSR communicative practices, we must move beyond the staid, homogeneous CSR reports and glossy public relations documents to reveal the messy and contradictory moments of decision wherein corporations and communities determine where a company has power and responsibility.
Amy O’Connor is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility Communication (2022).
Reviews
“The Mine Next Door is a beautifully written and crafted first person narrative of what is unfolding in the Iron Range. This book offers a truly fascinating contribution that will no doubt enhance the empirical side of CSR and community development in the mining sector.”
- Gavin Hilson, University of Surrey
“What happens when an expert in CSR spends years listening to the stories of miners and community members? We get superb storytelling and incisive analysis, as Amy O’Connor deftly weaves their lived experiences with a critical redrawing of the boundaries of CSR in this compelling ethnography of the mine next door.”
- Ganga S. Dhanesh, University of Maryland
“The Mine Next Door moves beyond glossy CSR reports and into the everyday lives shaped by the world’s largest open-pit iron ore mine. It follows five years of safety briefings, shutdowns, COVID protocols, contract disputes, taxes, and acts of giving—moments both quiet and seismic that bind a company to a place. Through a CCO lens, the book reimagines responsibility not as talk about walk, but as t(w)alking—where stories and actions shape each other in real time. Set against the energy transition, it reads union votes, safety stand downs, tax hearings, and donation ceremonies as events where ecological and social responsibilities are renegotiated. This is not a top-down tale. It’s polyphonic, with unions, regulators, and neighbors as co-creators of what CSR might mean. It reads with the flow of a novel, but the question it leaves behind is weighty: What do corporations owe the communities they inhabit? And what do we owe the places that mine the materials we use every day?”
- Urša Golob, University of Ljubljana