Sustainable CSR for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in engaged as a competitive tool in developing economies and it is a reality which faces strong criticism from the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME’s)-business units of small net worth with two striking characteristics - supported and managed by single individuals or his family members and operate in a ‘cluster’. MSME’s grow and flourish in a unique business environment while parameters for effective CSR remains the same for MSME’s and large corporations. Since MSME’s need to compete with the large corporations, CSR adoption is not a choice and therefore the current paper argues that policy makers should consider and create provisions to support, collective corporate social responsibilities, (CCSR) through which a group of MSME’s with similar sustainability needs support and take up socially responsible activities, as a unit.The clusters provide a conducive opportunity to MSME’s to adopt social responsibilities collectively, which will serve the needs of the various stakeholders like workers, community, environment, customers etc. This concept of ‘CCSR’ adheres and corroborates to all the Carroll’s (1991), 4 stages of CSR Pyramid. The results substantiate the earlier work suggesting that the western institutional and management models exported to other regions of the world are not always very successful (Wohlgemuth, Carlsson & Kifle ed, 1998) and understanding and practice of CSR should be socio-culturally framed (Sundar 2000).