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Florian Wettstein
In 1972, Dow Votaw, a pioneer in corporate social responsibility research, lamented the increasingly inflationary use of the term “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR). However, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the term being referred to in excess there seemed little clarity about its meaning:
The term is a brilliant one; it means something, but not always the same thing, to everybody. To some it conveys the idea of legal responsibility or liability; to others, it means socially responsible behavior in an ethical sense; to still others, the meaning transmitted is that of “responsible for,” in a causal mode; many simply equate it with a charitable contribution; some take it to mean socially conscious; many of those who embrace it most fervently see it as a mere synonym for “legitimacy,” in the context of “belonging” or being proper or valid; a few see it as a sort of fiduciary duty imposing higher standards of behavior on businessmen than on citizens at large.
(Votaw 1972: 25)
Despite dating back more than 40 years, Votaw’s assessment seems as accurate today as it was then. Even more has been written on CSR in the meantime, even more companies have signed up to the idea, even more approaches and interpretations are being offered in the now vast literature on the concept. Some of these conceptualizations overlap or complement each other, but, overall, there seems as little convergence among different approaches to CSR today as then.
Navigating and making sense of this heterogeneous field is no trivial task. Considering the breadth and depth of the discussion, it is hardly realistic for this chapter to aim at providing a complete overview of, or even a comprehensive introduction to, CSR. Any such overview or introduction must discriminate by necessity in order to remain manageable; it has to select carefully what to address and what not to address, what ideas and approaches to include or not to include, what arguments to emphasize and which to marginalize. As a consequence, this chapter aims to provide a systematic starting point for readers so that they can make sense of the CSR discussion and grasp core issues and problems connected to it. Even if it is not possible, in a short chapter such as this, to offer a full understanding of the CSR debate, the selected contents are, in my view, essential to a deeper understanding of that discussion and thus provide entry points for readers who seek a more thorough engagement.
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The chapter will, first, attempt to provide a formal (rather than substantive) definition of the term “social responsibility.” In the second section, the chapter will address the most basic prerequisite for corporations to be able to have social responsibilities in the first place. That is, it will tackle the question of whether or not corporations are moral agents. The third section will look at the definitional issue from a more substantive angle. What are the social responsibilities of companies? This will be followed by a broad overview of existing approaches and theories of CSR. Thus, section four will provide two basic taxonomies—one classifying CSR theory and one CSR practice. The fifth section will engage with new directions in CSR research. More specifically, it will explore three new and increasingly influential approaches in the broader discussion on corporate responsibility: Creating shared value, political CSR, and business and human rights.
“Social responsibility” is an inherently fuzzy concept. Even on its own, the term “responsibility” is notoriously ambiguous and multi-dimensional. Generally, we can distinguish four common uses of the term. First, in referring to a responsible person, we commonly mean reliable, good, virtuous or reasonable. That is, we refer to the morally favorable traits of someone’s character (Frankena 1973: 71). Second, a person can be responsible for a specific past action or incidence, meaning that the person can be blamed for causing it. Third, when referring to a person having a responsibility to engage in certain types of activities or to bring about specific consequences in the future we use the term synonymously with obligation. Finally, in a very basic sense, a responsible person is a person who is capable of being ascribed responsibility. Responsibility, in this basic sense, means having a basic capacity to reason.
Responsibility in a moral sense is closely associated with ascribing praise or blame. That is, praise or blame are our typical (even natural) responses to someone having caused, with his or her actions, a negative (blameworthy) or positive (praiseworthy) outcome. In other words, we tend to view someone as morally responsible (in the second backward-looking sense above) if it is appropriate to either praise or blame that person for a certain action or outcome. Thus, moral responsibility in this sense is akin to blameworthiness or praiseworthiness (Eshleman 2014).
Now, to what does social responsibility refer? Similar to the meaning of “responsibility,” the meaning of “social” is multi-faceted and contested as well. Without dwelling too much on content, we can access the term from two basic directions. First, “social” in connection with the term “responsibility” can refer to the foundation or source of that particular responsibility; and, second, it can refer to its addressee and thus to the basic nature or quality of the activities required of an agent to meet the responsibility.
Turning first to the question of foundations, Richard DeGeorge distinguishes between three sources that give rise to three different kinds of (corporate) responsibility: moral, social, and legal (DeGeorge 2010: 198–204). DeGeorge argues that they often overlap, but should not be confused conceptually. Moral responsibility, according to DeGeorge (2010: 198–99), arises from ethical grounds. It is independent from what the law says and what is socially mandated. A company that dumps toxic waste into a river inevitably causes harm and thus violates its moral responsibilities irrespective of whether or not this practice is prohibited by law or socially accepted by the people and communities whose river is being polluted. Social responsibility, on the other hand, derives from social demands and expectations. It is what society explicitly or implicitly expects of businesses. Finally, and perhaps most straightforward, legal responsibility derives from what is mandated by law.
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This distinction particularly between social and moral responsibility as outlined by DeGeorge, while conceptually useful, seems problematic from a normative point of view. At any given time, social demands (that is, what society expects of businesses) overlap considerably with moral requirements (that is, what businesses ought to do based on ethical considerations), but may not coincide fully. Social demands may exceed moral requirements or vice versa. For example, people might be too optimistic about what a company can reasonably achieve in regard to supply chain responsibility in the short term and thus set the bar too high for businesses. On the other hand, we may find certain tax avoidance strategies as acceptable simply because they are common practice. However, this does not mean that such strategies are also morally legitimate. So, how ought businesses to deal with situations in which social demands run counter to basic moral requirements? What if social demands are unjust, discriminatory, or offensive? Does it still make sense in such cases to claim that companies have an actual responsibility to meet such socially harmful demands and expectations? It seems that to turn social demands into actual social responsibilities for business, they ought to be justifiable also from a moral point of view; at the very least, I would argue that they cannot run counter to some of the most fundamental moral principles without losing their normative status as actual responsibilities. Hence, while it makes sense to distinguish between social and moral demands and expectations, it may be problematic to do so also in regard to social and moral responsibilities.
Concordantly, I would argue that the term “social” in social responsibility does not refer to the foundation of the responsibility, but rather to the quality of the required action or the nature of its expected impact. Social responsibility in this second sense is a responsibility for social action, that is, for action that expresses concern for and has a positive impact on society (DeGeorge 2010: 200). More specifically, the responsibility to engage in a socially beneficial (or non-harmful) activity should possess its own moral justification (or demonstrated moral compatibility) that does not rest solely on the appeal to the purported social benefit.
If, as we have argued, social responsibility ought to be grounded or at least justified morally, the question arises whether or not companies can, in fact, be ascribed moral or social responsibilities. This question is synonymous with the question of whether or not corporations are moral agents, since only moral agents are capable of having and discharging social or moral responsibility. This fundamental prerequisite of the corporate social responsibility discussion will be addressed in the next section.
Can corporations have moral responsibilities? Corporations as moral agents
Morally grounded responsibility can be ascribed only to moral actors, that is, to actors capable of acting intentionally. Thus, while corporate legal responsibility merely presupposes that corporations are recognized as legal persons in law, social or moral responsibility requires more than that: it requires that companies can be viewed not merely as legal, but as moral persons or, alternatively, as moral agents. Therefore, the question that precedes all other questions about the form and content of corporate social responsibility is to what extent the characteristics of moral agents apply also to collective actors such as companies and other organizations.
On one end of the spectrum are those who hold that corporations are merely aggregates of individuals (see Werhane 2015: 13). Accordingly, they argue that only individuals can be bearers of moral responsibility but not corporations as entities (see, e.g., Velasquez 1983; Friedman 1962, 1970). On this view, it would be conceptually wrong to assign moral responsibility to a corporation because all corporate acts are, in fact, the acts of individuals within the company. The same goes for corporate intentions, which, as they argue, are always the shared intentions of individuals. Manuel Velasquez (1983) also sees practical danger in such a position: seeing corporations as moral agents who can be blamed and held morally responsible creates a corporate veil that shields individuals within the company from being held responsible for their wrongdoings.
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A slightly different argument is advanced in the “structural restraint view” (see Donaldson 1982: 24). This account of the corporation is based on a similar position about the moral agency, or lack thereof, of companies. As opposed to Velasquez’s view, which claims that morality in organizations is always reducible to individual intentions of its members, the structural restraint view holds that the way companies are set up prevents them from utilizing moral considerations in their decision-making. According to this account, corporations are built to maximize the achievement of a given set of goals at the expense of all other moral considerations (Donaldson 1982: 25). Such a view has recently been espoused, for example, by Joel Bakan (2004), who portrays corporations as psychopaths that are programmed for the sole pursuit of profits and power.
On the other end of the spectrum are those who argue that corporations are to be viewed as “full-fledged moral persons” with equal standing and the same privileges, rights and duties as human beings (see, e.g., French 1979).1 Peter French argued that corporations can be held morally responsible based on their corporate intentionality, which he perceived as distinct from the intentionality of any one of its members. Internal decision-making structures, according to French (1979: 212), incorporate the acts of its individual members and are thus the basis of corporate intentionality. Having such internal decision-making structures, corporations are capable of acting based on corporate reasons, which are irreducible to the reasons of its individual members. Therefore, corporate decisions are morally relevant in the sense that corporations can be ascribed moral responsibility that is equally irreducible to the responsibility of its individual members.
A middle ground between these two extreme views would be to attribute moral agency to corporations but not full-fledged moral personhood akin to human beings (Donaldson 1982). Such a position seems sensible. Moral persons are ends in themselves. Based on this, it would seem cynical to claim moral personhood for corporations (DeGeorge 2010: 112). Donaldson (1982) argued that in order to qualify as a moral agent, a company needs to embody a process of moral decision making, which is characterized by two elements: first, the capacity to use moral reasons in decision-making, and, second, the capacity to control (within the decision-making process) not only the actual activities and behavior of the company but also the structure and policies that guide such behavior. This second condition corrects a practical danger inherent to the structural restraint view. As Donaldson puts it:
A corporation which, despite having the requisite amount of control, failed to correct faulty procedures in its product safety division and procrastinated until a consumer was injured ought not be let off the moral hook by disclaiming moral agency. Only if the decision-making process of a corporation were thoroughly mechanistic and fit perfectly the Structural Restraint model, or if the corporation were thoroughly fragmented and lacked any significant decision-making mechanisms, would the corporation be analogous to the sick or insane person who could not tell right from wrong.
(Donaldson 1982: 31)
Based on this account, Donaldson proposes that companies should be required to meet these conditions for moral agency, in order to qualify as corporations. That is, they ought to meet the conditions for moral agency in order to become incorporated.
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In summary, while there has been an ongoing discussion on corporate moral agency since at least the 1970s, there is a broad consensus today both among scholars as well as in the broader public that we can hold corporations morally responsible for what they do. While this view may more often be informed by intuition, rather than by a well-grounded philosophical account of moral agency, it does find broad support also in the scholarly discussion on the issue.
What are the social responsibilities of corporations?
After clarifying that corporations, as moral agents, can have moral and social responsibilities, it is now time to look into what CSR entails.
Historically, the discussion on corporate social responsibility dates back to the 1950s. More specifically, Howard R. Bowen’s 1953 book on The Social Responsibilities of the Businessman is commonly regarded as the first text to address the topic in depth. For Bowen, social responsibility “refers to the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society.” Since Bowen, countless alternative definitions have been proposed. Generally, early approaches to CSR tended to have a rather philanthropic outlook (Carroll 1999). Business was seen to have a responsibility not only to abide by the law but to benefit society by donating a part of their profits to social causes. In more recent times, such charitable approaches to CSR have been criticized as inadequate or at least insufficient (see, e.g., Ulrich 2008: 402–404).
Thus, more recent approaches have rightly pointed out that CSR is less about charity than the way a corporation conducts its core business. As such, it concerns and affects everything from recruiting employees, to goal-setting processes, the design of incentive and reward systems, to product development and distribution, and so on (see, e.g., Waddock and Rasche 2012). Thus, rather than being supplemental to a company’s business activities, CSR ought to be integrated at the very core of them (see, e.g., Grayson and Hodges 2004). This is not to say that a well-designed philanthropic program cannot be a part of a holistic CSR strategy (see, e.g., Carroll 1998), but it hardly is the core or even the essence of it.
Opinions vary considerably regarding the content and focus of CSR. It is safe to say that the specific social responsibilities of companies are dependent on context and situation. Prominently, the European Commission (2011) recently put forth a broad definition of CSR as “the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society.” The idea of “impacts” is defined both in negative and positive terms: corporations ought to avoid adverse consequences for both society and the environment and to strive to increase their positive effects on others. Generally, as Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo (2007: 1096) have pointed out, CSR serves as something like an “umbrella term” for all those debates that deal with the “responsibilities of business and its role in society.” Similarly, Jan Jonker (2005) refers to CSR as a “sensitising concept,” that is, “a term that draws attention to a complex range of issues and elements that are all related to the position and function of the business enterprise in contemporary society. As such, this umbrella term helps to identify and address what needs to be debated” (Jonker 2005: 20).
Under this CSR umbrella countless standards and initiatives have formulated a wide range of norms, principles, and issues that corporations ought to respect and consider when conducting their business. It makes sense to look at such standards to get an idea about what specific responsibilities CSR may entail and what issues it may address. Most of such standards entail provisions regarding the proper treatment of workers and employees, prohibiting exploitative and unsafe working conditions as well as the use of sweatshops and child labor. Many subsume environmental responsibilities as a part of CSR, encouraging businesses to reduce their environmental footprint and work toward climate neutrality. Some standards are specifically geared toward stakeholder relations and the company’s impact on the communities in which it operates. Human rights impacts of companies have become a core concern of many CSR standards, such as the UN Global Compact, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Companies and, most recently, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. There is a tendency for such standards to become more expansive over time, that is, to cast the net of potential corporate responsibility ever wider. For example, while the UN Global Compact initially comprised of only nine broad principles, it has later added a tenth principle addressing anti-corruption efforts by businesses. In a similar manner, tax avoidance has been addressed more frequently under the CSR umbrella as well in recent times (see, e.g., Preuss 2010). Another trend is the formulation of industry-specific standards to address issues and problems particular to certain industries: for example, freedom of expression for the information and communication technology sector; access to essential drugs for pharmaceutical companies; or free, prior and informed consent of local communities to mining projects; or the use of force by private and public security contractors.
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Making sense of CSR theory and practice
There are countless approaches and theories of CSR in the vast literature on the topic. This section attempts to make conceptual sense and provide an overview of the CSR landscape by, first, developing a basic taxonomy that helps classifying CSR theories and, second, introducing two conceptual models that have done the same in regard to CSR practice.
CSR theories
There are many ways one could order and classify CSR theories. For example, Elisabet Garriga and Domènec Melé (2004; see also Melé 2008) distinguish between instrumental, political, integrative and ethical theories of CSR. The four categories roughly resemble four different perspectives from which to theorize CSR: economic, political, social and ethical. Duane Windsor (2006) starts from a similar vantage point, but distinguishes between only three basic categories of theories: ethical responsibility theory, economic responsibility theory, and corporate citizenship (in essence, a political responsibility theory). Peter Ulrich (2008) advances a normative taxonomy that proceeds from functional, instrumental, charitable and corrective approaches to integrative approaches. Ulrich’s categorization does not classify existing theories along certain conceptual traits, but assesses the normative merit of different approaches to CSR. The more holistically an approach challenges the dominant shareholder-value-maximization doctrine of the corporation, the higher its normative status.
The following overview of CSR theories draws, in varying degrees, on these previous attempts, rearranging their insights and adding new thought to them. It groups theories along two dimensions: the foundations on which they are built and their basic aims. Accordingly, within both dimensions, a number of sub-categories are distinguished.
Foundation
The CSR theories can be distinguished based on the foundation from which they derive corporate responsibilities. Three different foundations, which provide three different (moral) justifications for CSR, can be distinguished in this regard (see also Hsieh and Wettstein 2014).
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Purpose-based accounts derive the responsibilities of companies from the distinct purpose or function that companies are assigned in society. Narrow accounts interpret corporate purpose exclusively in economic terms, e.g., as the creation of wealth for society or, more narrowly, as the creation of value only for its owners. Accordingly, such accounts tend to define the respective corporate responsibilities in equally narrow terms. Milton Friedman’s (1970) view 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” can be viewed as representative of such interpretations. On the other hand, more expansive accounts tend to stress the social, rather than merely the economic, role and purpose of corporations. Accordingly, they tend to frame also the social responsibilities of companies in broader terms. Ulrich (2008: 410) argues that the purpose of business enterprises is more than merely providing goods for payment. Rather, as he argues, business activity must be guided by “a vision of real-life practical values which ought to be created, be it on the level of fulfilling fundamental human needs or on the level of enlarging the abundance of human life.” Thus, underlying business activity is an “idea of value creation which aims to make a genuine contribution to the quality of life in society” (Ulrich 2008: 410–11).
Power- or influence-based accounts portray companies as increasingly powerful actors in economic, social and even political terms and argue that such power must be accompanied by shouldering more (public) responsibility within and for society (Kobrin 2009: 350). At minimum, such accounts argue for the responsible and legitimate use of corporate power (Davis 1960). However, such approaches often embrace accounts of corporate responsibility that reach decisively beyond “do no harm” provisions for business (see, e.g., Wettstein 2012; Wood 2012). Especially where state institutions are weak or entirely absent, such accounts tend to argue that corporations ought to step in to fill, at least in part, the social and political void.
Relational accounts derive corporate responsibility not from purpose or power but from the kind of relations between corporations and their social environment. Contractual accounts argue that corporate responsibilities derive from a broad social contract between society and business. The most prominent theory in this category is Donaldson and Dunfee’s (1999) Integrated Social Contracts Theory (ISCT), which applies social contract thinking to the international context and thus provides a frame to derive the social responsibilities specifically of multinational companies. Theories that emphasize the fiduciary duty of managers to shareholders can also be framed in contractual terms. Directly opposed to theories stressing shareholder primacy is the broad field of stakeholder theories (Freeman 1984; Donaldson and Preston 1995; Phillips 2011). Stakeholder approaches perceive shareholders as only one among many groups to which companies have morally significant relations. Accordingly, such groups too may have legitimate stakes or claims in the company alongside, or in some cases prior to, shareholders. The main challenges of stakeholder theories are connected to the identification and prioritization of stakeholder groups (see Phillips 2003) as well as to the balancing of the respective stakeholder responsibilities. However, stakeholder approaches grapple with certain limitations and thus have been faced with fundamental challenges and criticisms (Norman 2013, 2004; Marcoux 2003). For example, it has been argued that they do not provide much insight into the role of business in finding solutions for large-scale societal problems (Walsh 2005). Goodpaster (2009) has framed this as the lack of what he calls “comprehensive moral thinking,” that is, as a lack of reflection about the larger social implications of corporate decision making and the influence of business behavior on the system as a whole. This apparent gap in stakeholder thinking may be addressed more convincingly by purpose-based and influenced-based outlooks as outlined above.
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Aim and outlook
An alternative way to group CSR theories is based on their basic aim and outlook. Four different approaches can be distinguished: normative, instrumental, managerial, and institutional. While the first two aim at providing a justification for CSR (one ethical, the other economic), the third and fourth are concerned more with its operationalization and implementation (one from a managerial, the other from an institutional perspective).
Normative approaches to CSR emphasize the intrinsic importance of corporate responsibility by appeal to moral principles, ideals and values, rather than instrumental utility (for example, to advance corporate profits). Advocates for these accounts argue for corporate responsibility not because it makes economic sense but because they see a moral obligation for companies to conduct their business in a responsible manner—irrespective of the financial costs or benefits this may imply. For example, stakeholder theories have been framed both in normative and strategic terms. Although Freeman’s (1984) original account had a strategic outlook, others (Donaldson and Preston 1995) have reformulated stakeholder thinking toward a normative perspective. Stakeholder interests, from a normative point of view, ought to be taken seriously for their own sake and based on their legitimacy, but, from a strategic perspective, the adequate consideration of stakeholder demands and interests is seen to be instrumental to the maximization of profits.
Strategic or instrumental approaches stress the so-called business case for CSR, that is, they highlight the economic or financial value of CSR for companies. According to this view, corporations should not primarily adopt CSR because it is the “right thing to do,” but because it is good for business. Accordingly, instrumental approaches argue that social responsibilities ought to be taken into consideration by companies only if they are consistent with the profit maximization aim (Garriga and Melé 2004). There is a long list of studies that have tried to prove a causal link between CSR and increasing financial returns, but evidence has been mixed (see, e.g., Orlitzky et al. 2003; Rost and Ehrmann 2015) and the methodology and general conceptual soundness of such correlations has frequently been questioned (see, e.g., Vogel 2005). Generally, a business case for CSR can be framed in two basic ways (see Paine 2000). The positive argument stresses the potential of CSR to increase profits, for example, by emphasizing reputational gains or increased productivity of employees. The negative argument, on the other hand, perceives CSR more as a tool to mitigate risk and associated costs that may arise from litigation, reputational damage, customer boycotts or generally from naming and shaming by civil society organizations.
Managerial approaches to CSR are less concerned with normative or instrumental justifications or the philosophical foundations of CSR than with its application and operationalization within the organization (see, e.g., Waddock and Rasche 2012; Paine 1994). Such approaches have been put forth first of all by strategy or general management scholars, rather than by business ethicists or philosophers.
Institutional approaches form perhaps the most recent group of CSR theories and have gained considerable influence in the field in recent years (e.g., Brammer et al. 2012). Such approaches seek neither to justify CSR nor to probe its managerial implications. Rather, they analyze the conditions under which CSR can be institutionalized in organizations, industries, and markets; explain how organizations strive for and achieve legitimacy; and explore how different institutional settings can either foster or hinder the effective diffusion of CSR practices throughout society. Institutional approaches have attracted scholars in organizational behavior and sociology to the field of CSR.
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CSR practice
What is the actual practice of CSR? Although it is difficult to gather direct data on the extent to which corporations integrate CSR in their operations there is some evidence. Along with earlier studies (Williams and Aguilera 2008; Visser 2008), one of the better and more recent gauges is the 2014 report on new business models for the twenty-first century developed by the highly acclaimed Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The EIU surveyed 285 senior executives from corporations across the globe (with 27 percent headquartered Western Europe, 24 percent in the US, 20 percent Asia-Pacific, 12 percent Latin America, 11 percent Middle East and Africa, and 6 percent in Eastern Europe), on their approaches, achievements, and future plans in regard to corporate sustainability. However, in this survey “sustainability” is defined as a company’s commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. Thus, depending on how broadly we define the scope of CSR, the survey suggests a significant overlap with CSR goals. (Most of the prevailing CSR standards such as the UN Global Compact or the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises specify norms in all three ESG domains.) The EIU reports that overall commitment to sustainability principles remains high even as more and more companies face increasing obstacles to embedding them in their business. As a result, 52 percent of surveyed companies now say that “immediate financial goals are currently more urgent.” Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the EIU observes that the expansion of sustainability practices in the past two years has come predominantly from developing economies. Twenty percent of the firms surveyed publish their sustainability goals and performance at least once a year. However, a third of them doubt that their sustainability strategies will stand the test of time. The report states that almost two thirds of the firms are reviewing new strategies and business models to ensure long-term sustainability, but only a very small number have actually followed up and revised their overall strategies accordingly.
If we turn from actual practice to a theoretical taxonomy of CSR practice, then we find a number of contributions that analyze how, as a matter of practice, companies evolve and progress as responsible organizations. Such studies set forth taxonomies to classify companies according to their position on a corporate responsibility spectrum.
In a widely cited paper, Simon Zadek (2004) showed that companies evolve on a “path to corporate responsibility” along five consecutive stages from “defensive” to “compliant,” “managerial,” “strategic,” and finally to the highest stage—“civil.” At the defensive stage, as Zadek points out, companies are often caught off-guard by criticism about their social or environmental conduct and, as a consequence, react with denial and rejection of such criticism. At the compliance stage, corporations start to realize that denial may not make the criticism disappear. So they switch to what we could call a strategy of appeasement. However, their response is often rather superficial and focused merely on the protection of the firm’s reputation. At the managerial stage, companies develop a deeper understanding of the problem. They begin to understand that real solutions will not transpire from communications or legal departments, but from the managers of the core business. For example, it is unlikely that adopting a standard on responsible sourcing will lead to a profound transformation of such practices without adjusting incentive structures and goal-setting accordingly. At the strategic stage, companies start to realign their core business strategies in order to address responsible business practices. Finally, at the civil stage, corporations promote collective action, that is collaboration within and across industries, in order to lift their whole industry or even the marketplace as such to a higher level of responsibility; they may even see a role for business to contribute together with other institutions to solving broader societal problems.
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Similar to Zadek’s typology, Mirvis and Googins (2006) distinguish five stages of corporate citizenship. At the elementary stage, citizenship activity within a corporation is episodic and responsibility programs are not well developed. There is little awareness regarding citizenship issues and companies merely aim at complying with the law. At the engaged stage of citizenship, companies become aware and start to engage with corporate responsibility, although in a largely reactive manner. At the innovative stage companies start to broaden their citizenship agenda and deepen their involvement, displaying high levels of innovation and moral learning. However, there remains little integration of citizenship programs with the core business strategies, corporate culture, and management systems of the company. At the integrated stage “companies take serious steps to drive citizenship into their lines of business. In operational terms, this involves setting targets, establishing key performance indicators, and monitoring performance through balanced scorecards” (Mirvis and Googins 2006: 115). Furthermore, at this stage corporate efforts are driven increasingly by values rather than by a business case. Finally, at the transformative stage, corporations display bigger aspirations to change the way business is done by fusing their citizenship and business agendas. Similar to Zadek’s typology, Mirvis and Googins point out that at this final stage, corporations partner and collaborate extensively with other institutions to drive a common responsibility agenda.
After classifying and outlining some of the major approaches and theories of CSR in the previous section, let us now take a closer look at three recent developments in the CSR discussion, each of which has the potential to provide novel insights that might push the debate into new directions.
Creating shared value
In a 2006 essay in Harvard Business Review, with a follow-up contribution to the same journal in 2011, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (2006, 2011) introduced the “Creating Shared Value” (CSV) approach. Particularly in their 2011 contribution, the authors intend nothing less than to redefine business and to reinvent capitalism itself, in order to regain trust for what they perceive as a system (and its players) under siege. In essence, CSV is built on the proposition that companies should create “economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges” (Porter and Kramer 2011: 64). Business ought to address social challenges and concerns from a value perspective, rather than to treat them as peripheral matters (66). Or, more bluntly stated, it should turn social problems into business opportunities (Crane et al. 2014: 130). Porter and Kramer subsequently propose three ways in which companies can create shared value: first, by reconceiving products and markets, second, by redefining productivity in the value chain, and, third, by building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations.
To be sure, CSV is not actually meant to be a CSR approach. On the contrary, it is to be understood as a more or less direct critique of CSR. The authors perceive CSR to be peripheral to business and largely ineffective, so they propose CSV as a way to move beyond CSR—by shifting social issues and challenges to the very center of the business equation. “Shared value” as the authors assert, “is not social responsibility . . . but a new way to achieve economic success” (Porter and Kramer 2011: 64).
Taken at face value, this seems a reasonable suggestion; and perhaps Porter and Kramer are correct in claiming that “most companies remain stuck in a “social responsibility” mind-set in which societal issues are at the periphery, not the core” (2011: 64). From that perspective, CSV may indeed reduce the level of hesitation among companies to address social issues proactively and through their core business processes. However, it is at least questionable whether doing away with the idea of responsibility altogether in favor of the similarly fuzzy idea of “shared value” ultimately is the right response to this diagnosis.
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Against this background, it is not surprising that CSV has been criticized harshly by a number of scholars, especially in the business ethics field. For example, Crane et al. (2014: 133) acknowledge that the CSV concept has succeeded in drawing more attention to the social dimension of doing business, thereby elevating this dimension to a strategic level. Nevertheless, they see it as a “reactionary” rather than transformational approach to solve what Porter and Kramer (2011: 64) perceive as a current trust and legitimacy crisis of business. More specifically, as they contend, the approach is, first, unoriginal and based on a caricature of CSR that emphasizes only its philanthropic dimension but ignores its connection to the core business of a company. Second, the win–win orientation of the approach ignores potential trade-offs between economic and social value-creation, which might ultimately “drive corporations to invest more in easy problems and decoupled communication strategies than in solving broader societal problems” (Crane et al. 2014: 137). Third, they lament the naiveté of the approach in taking business compliance with laws and social norms simply as a given, when, in fact, this remains an unresolved challenge. Finally, the authors criticize CSV for being based on a shallow conception of the corporation’s role in society, because it does not challenge the traditional competitive logic of doing business in a fundamental manner but rather affirms and bolsters it. After all, social problems, according to CSV, are relevant to companies only if they can be transformed into win–win opportunities. Thus, as they argue, CSV “wants to rethink the purpose of the corporation without questioning the sanctity of corporate self-interest” (Crane et al. 2014: 140).
Political CSR
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the above-cited critique of CSV and especially its alleged reaffirmation of a narrow economic role of the corporation has been voiced by a group of scholars, some of whom have been involved decisively in shaping a new research stream that has been labeled “political CSR.” Political CSR challenges a narrow economic interpretation of the role and purpose of companies. Instead, it is based on the observation that companies are increasingly involved in activities and tasks that are public in nature and formerly thought to be reserved for governments to discharge (see, e.g., Matten and Crane 2005; Scherer and Palazzo 2007). In short, corporations are turning into political actors, involved particularly in the governance of those spaces that increasingly elude governmental reach and control in what is often referred to as a “post-Westphalian” order:
political CSR suggests an extended model of governance with business firms contributing to global regulation and providing public goods. It goes beyond the instrumental view of politics in order to develop a new understanding of global politics where private actors such as corporations and civil society organizations play an active role in the democratic regulation and control of market transactions. These insights may enrich the theory of the firm with a more balanced view on political and economic responsibilities in a globalized world.
(Scherer and Palazzo 2011: 901)
Traditional notions of CSR, which build on the presumption of strong and reliable state institutions as well as a shared value basis, increasingly fail to deal adequately with the distinct challenges of this “post-national constellation” (Scherer and Palazzo 2011: 905). As a consequence, this constellation, as the authors suggest, has profound implications also for the theorization of CSR.
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This being said, the thought that corporations are politically relevant actors with political responsibilities is nothing new per se. Peter Drucker outlined the political nature of the company in 1946. In the “Concept of the Corporation” he denotes the business corporation as an institution,
[. . .] which sets the standard for the way of life and the mode of living of our citizens; which leads, molds and directs; which determines our perspective on our own society; around which crystallize our social problems and to which we look for their solutions.
(Drucker 1993: 6)
Similarly, in the 1960s, Dow Votaw (1961) urged that we understand the corporation as a political institution:
Only if we have a thorough familiarity with the corporation as a political institution, as well as an economic and social one, can we hope even to recognize the effects that it has had and will have on the rest of society.
(Votaw 1961: 106)
Political CSR generates for CSR theory a change in perspective that could be conceptualized along three lines: first, political CSR widens the scope of corporate responsibility. That is, relative to traditional conceptions of CSR, it includes a broader set of issues and problems within a company’s sphere of responsibility. Among the issues and problems that traditional notions of CSR tend to exclude are those connected to the provision of public goods and services. In contrast, for example, the perspective of political CSR encourages pharmaceutical companies to do more than merely provide effective drugs at a reasonable price or to donate essential drugs to low-income countries; rather, companies are encouraged to participate in broad coalitions—both public and private—whose aims encompass a holistic improvement of local health systems including access to medicine in the Global South. Such issues have traditionally been perceived as the exclusive domain of governments. Second, political CSR increases the extent of corporate responsibility. Corporations do not merely bear responsibility for problems they have directly caused, but increasingly also for issues to which they are merely connected. This enlarges the extent of responsibility, for example, along a company’s value chain. Thus, corporations are increasingly seen as having a responsibility not only in regard to the working conditions in their own subsidiaries but also in the factories of their suppliers, their contractors and sub-contractors. Third, political CSR advocates for a change in the nature of corporate responsibility. More specifically, it moves from a focus “merely” on the social responsibilities of business to a perspective of political responsibility, which is typically framed as a communicative and inherently collaborative kind of responsibility, expressed particularly through the involvement of companies in governance tasks (see Scherer and Palazzo 2007).
Business and human rights
Human rights are one of those domains previously thought to be of concern only to governments. However, since the mid-1990s there has been an increasingly influential debate on business responsibilities for human rights. This debate emerges in the 1990s and for reasons similar to those motivating the advocates of political CSR: “The root cause of the business and human rights predicament today,” as former UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights (SRSG) John Ruggie (2008: 3) puts it, “lies in the governance gaps created by globalization—between the scope and impact of economic forces and actors, and the capacity of societies to manage their adverse consequences.” And he goes on: “These governance gaps provide the permissive environment for wrongful acts by companies of all kinds without adequate sanctioning or reparation” (Ruggie 2008: 3; see also Fasterling and Demuijnck 2013: 800; Ramasastry 2015: 243; Simons and Macklin 2014: 9–16). Despite this resemblance to political CSR arguments, the business and human rights debate has been largely driven by legal perspectives rather than by CSR scholars (Wettstein 2012). Only recently has the debate caught on in other fields such as business ethics, CSR, and international relations, especially since the publication of the “Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework” (Ruggie 2008) and its operationalization via the “UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights” (Ruggie 2011).
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Two decades later this debate has turned into one of the most dynamic and perhaps most interdisciplinary discussions in the broader realm of corporate responsibility. While its focus is narrower than that of CSR more generally, it has some important lessons in store for conventional CSR conceptions (Wettstein 2016). First, its more narrow concern, particularly with human rights responsibility, helps focus the debate as well as the tools and instruments that emerge from it. Second, governments have been involved much more directly in agenda-setting processes for this debate than is the case for CSR. This is partly due to governments still being perceived as the primary bearer of human rights responsibility. Thus, the very definition and conceptualization of corporate human rights responsibility must necessarily address the role of governments. As a consequence, governments have a direct stake in the discussion and thus are more involved in driving it forward. Third, “business and human rights” has brought the law back into the corporate responsibility equation. While for CSR the law can be viewed as a frame or a background condition, exploring the active and productive use of the law for encouraging and enforcing human rights responsibility of companies has been at the very center of the agenda in business and human rights from the start.
Currently, the debate offers different avenues for research for scholars concerned with corporate responsibility. First, there has been an ongoing discussion both on the foundations (moral, political, legal) of attributing human rights responsibility to corporations (see, e.g., Muchlinski 2001; Wettstein 2009; Hsieh 2015) as well as on the scope and nature of corporate human rights responsibilities (see, e.g., Santoro 2009; Bilchitz 2010; Wettstein 2012). Second, there is a more specific debate, both critical and affirmative, on the UN Guiding Principles and their implementation as well as their interpretation in different industries and contexts. Third, there is a debate particularly on legal questions connected to business and human rights. Most prominent among them are questions on the extraterritorial application of domestic law for the protection of human rights abroad and issues and challenges connected to the emerging practice of foreign direct liability cases. In such cases corporate headquarters are sued in their home states for alleged human rights violations committed by their foreign subsidiaries abroad. Furthermore, there has been an ongoing debate on whether or not a legally binding international treaty on business and human rights will be necessary to close the governance gaps effectively. While the SRSG has been skeptical about the merit of such attempts, others have argued that a treaty would address the governance gaps more adequately than a voluntary initiative such as the Guiding Principles.
Concluding remarks
Theorizing corporate social responsibility is an ongoing project. The concept evolves as society evolves and it will therefore never be finished. Today, as we are in the midst of profound global transformations, the implications for how we perceive the purpose and the responsibilities of corporations may be equally profound. Some of the newer directions in corporate responsibility as outlined above have, to various degrees, started to integrate these transformations into their theorizing of the role of corporations in society. Generally, the evolution and growth of the debate on corporate social responsibility, from its beginnings in the 1950s to its current state, has been not only impressive but telling. The way we perceive and theorize the role and responsibilities of corporations says a lot about the state and outlook of our society in general. This alone indicates the inherently social (not merely economic) roots and implications of business.
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It was not the aim of this contribution to steer the debate in new directions, but to take stock of what has been done so far. As the global integration of societies continues at rapid speed and the internet and communication technology revolutionizes the ways we live and interact, the views on the corporation will evolve further and nurture new ideas and approaches to CSR. Thus, despite, or perhaps because of, the sometimes criticized “fuzziness” of the concept, research on CSR—conceptual, empirical, and normative—will remain highly relevant for years to come, not only for the sake of understanding corporations better, but for getting a better grasp of society in general.
Essential readings
There is a vast and diverse body of literature on CSR. Andrew Crane et al. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility (2008) provides an excellent introduction to and overview of the field. Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, by Archie B. Carroll et al. (2012), is essential for everyone with an interest in the history of CSR. While the book focuses on the US context, many of its insights are of general relevance. As a contrast, Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten, in Business Ethics: A European Perspective (2004) provide a European perspective on CSR, although from a more general business ethics perspective. In The Market for Virtue David Vogel (2005) shifts the perspective from the company to the market environment and assesses how market forces can facilitate or hinder responsible business practices and CSR. John M. Kline, in Ethics for International Business (2010), deals with the particular challenges of CSR in a global context. The discussion on political CSR connects in very direct ways to Kline’s international account. Andreas G. Scherer and Guido Palazzo’s essay, “Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility” (2007) outlines the rationale and basic outlook of this new research stream. For those concerned with questions of implementation and “how it is done” on the ground, consult Sandra Waddock and Andreas Rasche’s Building the Responsible Enterprise (2012) for helpful insight in how to build the responsible enterprise.
For further reading in this volume on the nature of a corporation, see Chapter 14, The corporation: genesis, identity, agency, and on the nature of business more generally, Chapter 13, What is business? On economic theories of the firm and the goals or aims of the corporation, see Chapter 17, The contribution of economics to business ethics. On the corporation as a locus of the social contract or as existing in contractual relation with society, see Chapter 6, Social contract theories. On human rights in the international context, see Chapter 31, The accounting profession, the public interest, and human rights. On socially responsible investment vehicles, see Chapter 20, Money and finance: ethical considerations. For some considerations on the idea of responsibility and leadership, see Chapter 25, Leadership and business ethics. For a brief discussion as to how the subject of business ethics is regarded as distinct from that of corporate social responsibility, see Chapter 38, Business ethics in Latin America.
Note
1 Note that Peter French eventually distanced himself from the claim that corporations are moral persons analogous to human beings and embraced a weaker account of corporations as moral agents (Arnold 2006: 280).
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