The triple-bottom-line of corporate responsibility: Assessing the attitudes of present and future business professionals across the BRICs

Abstract

Research on corporate responsibility (CR), a topic that has grown in importance over the past few decades, has focused primarily on developed countries. In this study, we look to the future and direct our attention to the values/attitudes of business professionals in two high-growth economies of the Asia Pacific; namely, China and India. These two countries, coupled with Brazil and Russia, make up the BRIC countries, which together and individually are increasingly becoming integral members of the global economic powerbase. Our attention in this paper is upon the triple-bottom-line—economic, social, and environmental—of CR. Using crossvergence theory as our theoretical foundation, we investigate the influence of specific macro-level socio-cultural and business ideology factors upon the triple-bottom-line of CR across the BRICs. We also investigated the meso-level trending similarities/differences in CR attitudes within and across these countries for both present generation and future generation business professionals. At the macro-level, we found that socio-cultural values were the best predictor of CR attitudes. At the generational level, we found that the future generation in these developing/transitioning countries placed more importance on economic CR than on social or environmental CR. In sum, the BRIC countries provide potentially fruitful contexts for future research, for which this study lays a foundation.