Corporate Social Responsibility in Retrospect and Prospect: Exploring the Life-Cycle of an Essentially Contested Concept

No. 59-2011 ICCSR Research Paper Series – ISSN 1479-5124

Corporate Social Responsibility in Retrospect and Prospect:

Exploring the Life-Cycle of an Essentially Contested Concept



(Introduction to Jean-Pascal Gond and Jeremy Moon eds (2011)

Routledge Major Work on Corporate Social Responsibility

)

Jean-Pascal Gond and Jeremy Moon



Research Paper Series

International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility

ISSN 1479-5124

Editor: Rob Caruana



International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility

Nottingham University Business School

Nottingham University

Jubilee Campus

Wollaton Road

Nottingham NG8 1BB

United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 115 84 66798

Fax: +44 (0) 115 84 68074

Email: robert.caruana@nottingham.ac.uk

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/ICCSR 2 2

Corporate Social Responsibility in Retrospect and Prospect:

Exploring the Life-Cycle of an Essentially Contested Concept



„„Corporate social responsibility means something, but not always the same thing to everybody." Votaw (1972, p. 25)

"The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches, which are controversial, complex and unclear." Garriga and Melé (2004, p. 51)



INTRODUCTIONi



Through the twentieth century, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) developed both as a management idea (Porter and Kramer 2006, Donham 1927) and as an academic concept (Bowen 1953, Walsh, Weber and Margolis 2003, Clark 1916).ii This development has been reflected in the depth and breadth of its place in management and the academy, particularly management and business scholarship and education (Cheit 1978, Frederick 2006, Matten and Moon 2004, Moon and Orlitzky 2011). The development has certainly been uneven but it is also true to say that CSR‘s status in the second decade of the twenty-first century is greater than it had been in the previous hundred years (de Bakker, Groenewegen and den Hond 2006, Lockett, Moon and Visser 2006, Margolis and Walsh 2003). The emphasis of this collection is certainly academic but it also includes numerous accounts of CSR as a management concept and practice.

Corporate social responsibility broadly refers to: (a) the expectation that business is responsible to society—in the sense of accountability (Bowen 1953, Carroll 1979) and for society—in the sense of compensating for negative externalities and contributing to social welfare (Crouch 2006, Arrow 1974); (b) the expectation that business conducts itself a responsible fashion (Carroll 1979); and more specifically (c) the management by business of the corporation-society interface through the enhancement of stakeholder relationships (Barnett 2007, Gond and Matten 2007, Freeman 1984) . 3 3

However, as we shall see below, definitions have varied together with the concepts used to describe the social phenomena corresponding to CSR. Although these transformations usually reflect sound conceptual developments (Wood 1991, Carroll 2008) or changes in managerial practices and visions they also reveal the zeitgeist that accompany the cycle of consulting and managerial fads and fashions (The Economist 2005, 2008, Abrahamson 1996, den Hond, de Bakker and Neergard 2007).

Thus CSR can be understood as dynamic, overlapping and contextual. Its dynamic quality in large part rests on the developments in business-society relations – including through new or re-invigorated understandings of irresponsibility. The overlapping nature of CSR reveals that it is something of a ‗cluster concept‘ (Moon 2002: 4) reaching into and drawing from such cognate fields as business ethics, corporate governance, business strategy, sustainability, business-society relations and business-government relations, to name but a few. Although the emergence of CSR has been most conspicuous in the USA (see Volume 1 in particular), it is also true that CSR has also emerged in very different national contexts, reflecting different corporate governance, institutional, economic, political, social and ethical contexts such that CSR stories can be told in a variety of countries (see Volume 3 in particular). Moreover, even within and across countries different sectors have developed distinctive CSR trajectories, often reflecting respective balances of risk and opportunity, or market structure and ownership.

As a result of this dynamic, overlapping and contextual character, a broad range of labels, concepts and constructs have been used to describe and theorize the social phenomena that correspond to CSR—e.g., Businessmen Responsibility, Corporate Social Performance, Corporate Social Responsiveness, The Triple Bottom Line, Corporate Stakeholder Responsibility or Corporate Citizenship—to name but a few. We use the label of CSR as an overarching ‗umbrella construct‘ as suggested by Hirsh and Levin who define this category as ―broad concepts used to encompass and account for a diverse set of phenomena‖ (1999, p. 199). In line with Garriga and Melé (2004) and Gond and Matten (2007), we contend that in the specific case of CSR, the set of phenomena encompassed by this broad concept refers by and large to the business and society interface. 4 4

Our purpose in this introduction is to briefly account for the development of the CSR umbrella construct in practice and academia, in order to lay the ground for organizing the perspectives we have used to make sense of the CSR literature in this collection. We rely on several metaphors that shed complementary lights on the complex of CSR genesis and development in theory and practice. According to Morgan (1980, p. 612) metaphors are useful to question theoretical assumptions. Metaphors are effective when they can link two phenomena that are perceived as overlapping yet significantly different. Metaphors also offer a powerful way of accounting for the nature and development of an academic concept.

We first review the emergence and changes of definitions of the CSR construct, and we infer from this exercise that CSR can be described as ‗chameleon concept‟ as its definition and nature seems to change over time. To address this changing nature, we rely on a second marketing metaphor and investigate the CSR „product life-cycle‟ in line with prior works focused on conceptual developments in organization theory and business and society (Hirsch and Levin 1999, Gond and Crane 2010). This exercise allows specifying the nature of CSR as a permanent issue and an area of debates in management theory and practice, rather than a well stabilized construct with a clear and constant operationalization. The third, philosophical, metaphor we mobilized to interpret this state of affairs and deepen our understanding of CSR is the notion of „essentially contested concept‟ proposed by Gallie (1955 – 1956) (see also, Moon 2002, Okoye 2009). We finally explain and briefly introduce our selection of texts in the four volumes.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY:

CSR AS A CHAMELEON CONCEPT



The ‗chameleon‘ is probably the best animal metaphor for describing the changing nature of CSR both as a managerial idea and as an academic concept. From a managerial viewpoint, the ‗social responsibility ideology‘ has emerged in the US in the late 1800s from a tradition of industrial paternalism or philanthropy grounded in the religious beliefs of leading captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller (Heald 1970, Carroll 2008). Contrary to a received view (e.g., Porter and Kramer 2006), social responsibility has been shaped by businessmen themselves (Bowen 1953, Frederick 2006, Swanson 2008). It is to a large extent a by-product of 5 5

the broader movement of managerial professionalization (see, e.g., Abrams 1951, Donham, 1927) that accompanied the progressive separation of corporate ownership and corporate control (Berle and Means 1932). This separation has created both a need for the new class of ‗professional managers‘ to justify their social status vis-à-vis the society, and the possibility to do so, in enhancing forms of managerial discretion that had no historical precedent (Friedman 1970, Bowen 1953, Berle and Means 1932).

As an ideology, social responsibility is aimed at enhancing the legitimacy of both ‗big business‘ and its management (Acquier and Gond 2007, Moon, Kang and Gond 2010, Pasquero 2005). The legitimacy of the new ‗giant‘ corporations under cephalisation was indeed contested at the beginning of the prior century (Chandler 1962, 1977). On the one side, the so-called ―muckrakers‖ vocally denounced corporate scandals (e.g., Sinclair 1946), raising public concerns about corporate regulation (Markham 2002). On the other side, this uncontrolled development of ‗hierarchy‘—an inherent feature of corporations as organizational forms (Williamson 1985)—was perceived as a direct threat to American democratic ideals (Miller and O'Leary 1989). In this new context, executives started thinking about the perception of their business activities in the eyes of what was broadly defined as the ‗general public‘. The first ‗public relations‘ departments were created (Heald 1970) and with them emerged the idea that corporations have a duty to serve the general public, and diffused the notion of public service that corresponds to an early form of social responsibility (Toynbee 1953).

In the 1920s, social responsibility was most commonly approached by managers in terms of stewardship and trusteeship, two notions inspired by the protestant religion (Bowen 1953, Carroll 2008, Heald 1970). ―Stewardship‖ contends that ―those who own property have the duty of using and administering it, not exclusively for their own purpose, but in ways that will serve the needs of the whole society‖ whereas ―trusteeship‖ affirms that ―[T]he owner is a trustee accountable to God and society‖ (Bowen 1953, p. 33). According to Heald (1961, 1970) these two concepts provided the ideological foundations that laid the ground for the development of CSR in the USA until the 1960s, and the most noticeable innovation of the 1950s and the 1960s would be the formulation and diffusion of the social responsibility label itself. In a bit less than 50 years, CSR was thus successively approached in the managerial world through 6 6

notions as diverse as ‗public service‘, ‗stewardship‘, ‗trusteeship‘ and finally ‗social responsibility‘.

Between the 1950s and the 1960s, social responsibility moved from practice to academia and CSR became a theoretical concept on its own (Heald 1970). This process would accelerate the pace of CSR transformations. Howard R. Bowen is often credited with being the founder of ‗modern corporate social responsibility‘ (Wood 1991, Carroll 2008, Carroll 1999), through the publication of his landmark book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman in 1953. Although his book laid strong institutional economic foundations for studying social responsibility as a tool for corporate behaviours regulation (Acquier, Gond and Pasquero 2011), the academic posterity does not remain much more that its page 6 definition of social responsibility as ―[…] the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of actions which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society‖ (p. 6). This first definition of businessmen‘s social responsibility opened a subsequent succession of academic refinements and redefinitions.

Table I provides an overview of the CSR ‗definitional work‘ that has been already reviewed in depth by Carroll (1999, 2008). The chameleon kept changing its form, as several authors proposed alternative conceptualizations to capture the social phenomenon of CSR, such as corporate social responsiveness (―CSR-2‖) that in the 1970s focused on the management of social issues (e.g., Frederick 1978) or corporate social performance that aims at integrating the prior notion of social responsibility (e.g., Carroll 1979). 7 7

Table 1. Illustrative CSR Concepts and Definitions Author(s)	Construct proposed	Definition provided	Focus / Perspective
Bowen (1953)	Businessmen social responsibility	―It refers to the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of actions which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society‖ (p. 6)	Businessmen / Normative / Institutional
Davis (1960)	Corporate social responsibility	―businessmen‘s decisions and actions taken for reasons at least partially beyond the firm‘s direct economic or technical interest‖ (p. 70)	Business men / Normative / Beyond expectations
McGuire (1963)	Corporate social responsibility	―The idea of social responsibilities supposes that the corporation has not only economic and legal obligations but also certain responsibilities to society which extend beyond these obligations‖ (p. 144)	Corporation / Normative / Beyond expectations
Walton (1967)	Corporate social responsibility	―In short, the new concept of social responsibility recognizes the intimacy of the relationships between the corporation and society and realizes that such relationships must be kept in mind by top managers as the corporation and the related groups pursue their respective goals‖ (p. 18)	Top managers / Normative / Institutional
Friedman (1970)	Business social responsibility	―There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.‖ (p.LAST)	Normative / Critical / Profit focus
Eells and Walton (1974)	Corporate social responsibility	―In its broadest sense, corporate social responsibility represents a concern with the needs and goals of society which goes beyond the merely economic. Insofar as the business system as it exists today can only survive in an effectively functioning free society, the corporate social responsibility movement represents a broad concern with business‘s role in supporting and improving social welfare‖ (p. 247)	Normative / Institutional / Ecological / Welfare focused
Frederick (1978 [1994])	Corporate social responsiveness	―‗Corporate social responsiveness refers‘ to the capacity of a corporation to respond to social pressures‖ (1994, p. 247)	Corporation / Institutional
Carroll (1979)	Corporate social responsibility	―The social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time‖ (p. 500)	Business / Integrative
Carroll (1979)	Corporate social performance	―…for managers to engage in CSR they needed to have (a) a basic definition of CSR, (b) an understanding/enumeration of the issues for which a social responsibility existed (or, in modern terms, stakeholders to whom the firm had a responsibility, relationship or dependency), and (c) a specification of the philosophy of responsiveness to the issues‖ (as reported in Carroll, 1999, p. 283-283)	Managers / Integrative