The Future of Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

This paper offers a contemporary look at that part of corporate community involvement which in recent years has become known as ‘corporate social responsibility’. The author adopts a broader perspective than Michael Porter's prominent article on ‘corporate philanthropy’. Here, the voluntary and discretionary expenditures of business on social and environmental projects are seen to be more closely aligned with corporate risk management and reputation-building than with corporate strategy. After some observations about terminology and philosophical attitudes, the paper notes the growing pressure on business to undertake discretionary social and environmental expenditures and to account publicly for such activities through institutionalized annual reporting. Some recent international initiatives to foster and popularize corporate social responsibility are summarized and their features briefly assessed, as is one attempt to measure corporate social responsibility. The paper seeks to illuminate the ‘hidden’ issues in this increasingly popular contemporary movement. The most important of these are to identify who ultimately pays for such expenditures and who ultimately makes decisions about them. At the same time it is noted that the capabilities of private business in the social arena may sometimes exceed those of government. The paper concludes with a number of judgements about the nature and legitimacy of this contemporary development and also about its future.