Sea change: Santa Barbara and the eruption of corporate social responsibility

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs have proliferated among the world's largest corporations. While the lion's share of scholarly attention has been devoted to the competitive advantage of CSR as a branding strategy, very little notice has been taken of CSR's history, particularly the emergence of CSR programs during the politically turbulent l960s and l970s. The paucity of historical attention has led to several distortions, including the failure to recognize CSR's origins as a survivalist reaction to crisis, and the resulting overemphasis of CSR as an unambiguously ethical model of managerial proactive effectiveness. Based on an examination of newspaper records of a politically crystallizing oil spill in the waters off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and an analysis of CSR's market penetration and rhetoric, this paper offers an alternative framework for reexamining corporate social responsibility.