Abstract
In this paper, we argue that individuals – as members of society – play an important role in the expectations of whether or not companies are responsible for addressing environmental issues, and whether or not governments should regulate them. From this perspective of corporate social responsibility as a social contract we report the results of a survey of 1066 individuals. The aim of the survey was to assess participants’ belief in anthropogenic climate change, free-market ideology, and beliefs around who is responsible for dealing with climate change. Results showed that both climate change views and free market ideology have a strong effect on beliefs that companies are responsible for dealing with climate change and on support for regulatory policy to that end. Furthermore, we found that free market ideology is a barrier in the support of corporate regulatory policy. The implications of these findings for research, policy, and practice are discussed.
Highlights
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is based on the assumption that, at any given point in time, there is a social contract between an organization and society in which the organization has economic and legal responsibilities and ethical and philanthropic responsibilities (Carroll, 1991, 1999; Donaldson and Dunfee, 1994, 1999, 2000)
We propose that the more a person believes in anthropogenic climate change, the more likely they are to view climate change as a non-discretionary part of CSR and the more it is viewed as non-discretionary, the more likely it is to be seen as something that should be legally mandated; we hypothesize that: Hypothesis 2: Belief in anthropogenic climate change will be positively related to support for corporate regulatory policy, mediated by a positive relationship with beliefs that corporations have a duty to deal with climate change
We have followed the traditional thinking that belief in anthropogenic climate change will be a panacea for changing the public expectations related to a corporation’s responsibility for dealing with climate change. Will this be enough? We propose that as well as beliefs about climate change, when we consider the social contract with corporations we need to consider beliefs about the perceived broader role of organizations in society; in other words, we suggest that free market ideology is necessary to consider
Summary
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is based on the assumption that, at any given point in time, there is a social contract between an organization and society in which the organization has economic and legal responsibilities and ethical and philanthropic responsibilities (Carroll, 1991, 1999; Donaldson and Dunfee, 1994, 1999, 2000). Research has shown that managers who see climate change as a threat to their organization are more likely to follow regulation rather than take on voluntary corporate environmental strategies (Sharma, 2000) if a community member thinks that companies have a duty to deal with CSR, they may be unwilling to rely on managers engaging in it voluntarily (because if the manager sees it as a threat he or she will ignore the duty perceived by others) and instead are more likely to prefer that the company is held legally responsible. We propose that free market ideology will have an additional effect to its relationship with anthropogenic climate change, and that is its effect on whether a person believes that dealing with climate change is a legal, ethical or discretionary responsibility of the organization. This interaction is such that when free market ideology is strong, the mediated relationships will be stronger than when free market ideology is weak
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