Ethics, Power and Communities: Corporate Social Responsibility Revisited

ally-building, communities, Corporate Social Responsibility, ethics, inter-organizational, reciprocity, Nissan, Starbucks, Pfeffer,

Community-Based Strategy in the Postmodern Society

In recent decades, a new social condition has emerged, in which human beings increasingly seek to strengthen their identity by belonging to communities. The role of these communities as providers of identity may offer a powerful construct for explaining and interpreting a vast array of firm activities and actions, as well as evaluating their potential for creating and sustaining competitive advantage. We develop a framework in which firms implement strategies to interact with communities. The framework provides insights that apply to various domains of the organization literature, ranging from corporate identity to supplier relationships and from human resource practices to corporate social responsibility

Managers' Corporate Social Responsibility Perceptions and Attitudes across Different Organizational Contexts within the Non-Profit-For-Profit Organizational Continuum

This article presents qualitative, case study research and contributes to the literature by presenting managers' views on corporate social responsibility (CSR) within three different types of organizational contexts (non-profit, for-profit and a middle/hybrid case) that have never embedded CSR policies and practices. To the best of the author's knowledge, no other study has compared managers' CSR attitudes within such a combination of organizational contexts. The findings from this study indicate that some considerations with regards to CSR are transferable across organizational contexts (i.e. issues around the attainability of CSR, emphasis given to ethics and integrity and managers associating CSR with employee-related activities), while others are context specific. The context-specific ones show that organizational culture and an organization's position in the non-profit/for-profit continuum are key contextual influences on managers' CSR attitudes. Moreover, influences relating to individual managers' work, as well as the extent to which CSR is an implicit or an explicit part of decision-making determine managerial perceptions of CSR. The implications for management practice (i.e. a one-size-fits-all approach to CSR practice is wrong) and CSR research (i.e. more context-sensitive and interdisciplinary research) are discussed. The findings are relevant both to organizations considering CSR engagement and those already implementing CSR. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Doing well or doing good? Extrinsic and intrinsic CSR in Switzerland

Arguably, within Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) the intrinsic motive is more significant than the extrinsic because the former induces a stronger involvement. Others showed that a behaviour attributed to extrinsic motives is mostly perceived as dishonest and misleading. This highlights how important the underlying motivation is for the perception, and thus, design and effectiveness of CSR frameworks. This study discusses these divergent motives with two focus groups: together with seven owner-managers of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) and seven managers of large companies. The results show that CSR implementation in Swiss SMEs is related more strongly to moral commitment than to profit-maximisation. Accordingly, small business CSR emerges from the nexus of mission and value-set and the sociological tradition of the stewardship concept. This contrasts the extrinsically motivated approach of the large companies under research. In sum, this study showed that CSR is meaningful and justifiable even if it is not profitable in the first place