Drivers of Csr

THE DRIVERS OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A CRITICAL REVIEW
Matthew Haigh, University of Amsterdam Marc T. Jones, Ashridge Business School Abstract The paper criticises the dominant discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by examining six sets of factors conventionally considered as promoting outcomes consistent with core principles of social responsibility: intra-organizational factors, competitive dynamics, institutional investors, end-consumers, government regulators and non-governmental organizations. Each factor is addressed conceptually, empirically, and with respect to its likely future significance in promoting outcomes consistent with CSR. Our overall conclusions are not promising on any of these dimensions. CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND STAKEHOLDERE MANAGEMENT Business ethicists borrow from the works of such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to assert that normative obligations on the firm imposed by the social contract require constructive responses to the needs of owner and non-owner groups (Palmer, 2001). Ethics and responsibility are most often unreflexively presented as atomised problems for individual decision-makers in the firm, solvable through straightforward application of logical rules and codes of conduct. Relevant definitions of responsibility are narrow: “issues of corporate responsibility are of smaller scope than the ethical foundations of capitalism” (Goodpaster, 1983, p. 3). Ethical questions are restricted to external corporate effects such as the means of production, in which relevant questions are held to arise in places such as stockholder and consumer protection and occupational health and safety. Exemplary behaviour is encoded in governance guidelines emanating from organisations such as stock exchanges. Departing from the deference that conventional approaches to CSR show toward corporate interests, Daly (1996) calls for systems thinking on sustainable economic development as a tenable

References: Abelson, P. (2002). Lectures in public economics 4th ed. Sydney: Applied Economics. Adams, C.A. (2002). Internal organizational factors influencing corporate social and ethical reporting: beyond current theorising. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 15(2), 223–250. Bansal, P., and Roth, K. (2000). Why companies go green: a model of ecological responsiveness. Academy of Management Review 13(4), 717–736. Berle, A.A., and Means, G.C. (1968 [1932]). The modern corporation and private property. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Biddle, D. (2000). Recycling for profit. In Harvard Business Review on business and the environment. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Firing back against the tyranny of the market. New York: The New Press. Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit over people: neoliberalism and global order. New York: Seven Stories Press. Daly, H.E. (1997). Beyond growth: the economics of sustainable development. Boston: Beacon Press. Deetz, S. (1991). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization. Albany: New York State University of New York Press. Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk 7 Dick-Forde, E. (2005). Democracy matters in corporate accountability: a Caribbean case study. Critical Perspectives on Accounting proceedings, City University of New York. Dugger, W.M. (1989). Corporate hegemony. New York: Greenwood Press. Goodpaster, K.E. (1983). The concept of corporate responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics 2(1), 1–22. Gorz, A. (1987). Critique of economic reason. London: Verso. Guay, T., Doh, J.P., and Sinclair, G. (2004). Non-governmental organizations, shareholder activism, and socially responsible investments: ethical, strategic, and governance implications. Journal of Business Ethics 52(1), 125–139. Haigh, M. (forthcoming(a)). What counts in social investment: international survey evidence. Advances in Public Interest Accounting. Haigh, M. (forthcoming(b)). Managed investments, managed disclosures: financial services reform in practice. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. Haigh, M. (forthcoming(c)). Social investment: subjectivism, sublation and the moral elevation of success. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. Haigh, M., and Hazelton, J. (2004). Financial markets: a tool for social responsibility?. Journal of Business Ethics 52(1), 59–71. Jones, M.T. (1996). Social Responsibility and the green business firm. Industrial and Environmental Crisis Quarterly 9(3), 327–345. Jones, M.T. (1993). Adam Smith and the ethics of contemporary democratic capitalism in New Zealand. International Journal of Social Economics 20(12), 3–13. King, A., and Lenox, M. (2001). Does it really pay to be green? an empirical study of firm environmental and financial performance. The Journal of Industrial Ecology 5(1), 105–116. Lehman, G. (1999). Disclosing new worlds: a role for social and environmental accounting and auditing. Accounting. Organizations and Society 24(3), 217–241. McWilliams, A., and Siegel, D. (2001). Corporate social responsibility: a theory of the firm perspective. Academy of Management Review 26(1), 117–127. Milne, M.J., and Chan, C.C. (1999). Narrative corporate social disclosures: how much of a difference do they make to investment decision-making?. British Accounting Review 31, 439–457. Palmer, E. (2001). Multinational Corporations and the social contract. Journal of Business Ethics 31(3), 245– 258. Porter, M., and van der Linde, C. (2000). Green and competitive: ending the stalemate. In Harvard Business Review on business and the environment. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Schwartz, M.S. (2003). The ‘ethics’ of ethical investing. Journal of Business Ethics 43, 195–213. Smith, N.C. (1990). Morality and the market: consumer pressure for corporate accountability. London: Routledge. Wood, D.J. (1991). Corporate social performance revisited. Academy of Management Review 16, 691–718. Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk 8 First appeared in The Business Review, Cambridge Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk 9