A stakeholder view of quality management and CSR through feminist ethics

Abstract

This study analyzes the shared values and concepts of quality management, corporate social responsibility, and the feminist ethics of care through an integrative review of literature and examines their commonalities, differences, and complementarities to identify opportunities for research and practice. We use the Baldrige Award core values and concepts as a framework for analysis, since they embody many of the shared concepts of these domains. We also use stakeholder theory as the underlying theory for this analysis. This study takes a novel, interdisciplinary approach and argues that the feminist perspective to stakeholder theory offers new perspectives for both fields. The feminist perspective is missing from the quality management and operations management literatures, and it is only recently emerging in the corporate social responsibility field. This study contributes to the literature by identifying gaps in our understanding of the relational perspectives embedded in the feminist ethics of care within the contexts of quality management and corporate social responsibility and offers a new lens through which quality management and corporate social responsibility implementations can be viewed. It also points out areas of research where opportunities for the development of expanded frameworks for these implementations exist.