Abstract
Despite its growth in popularity in the past twenty years, CSR has serious limitations, which profoundly affect its ability to reduce the negative social, environmental, and economic impacts that companies generate as they pursue the financial bottom line. Emerging as a response to changing expectations of how organizations should behave in a complex and increasingly globalized world, its incoherency makes it inadequate to deal with the serious problems faced by humanity in the twenty-first century. This chapter summarizes the origins of CSR, as well as its limitations and fundamental underlying contradictions. It then explains why CSR needs to adopt a more coherent approach and outlines what that approach should look like.
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Notes
- 1.
The emphasis will be essentially on the internal workings and thinking of any business themes such as employee relations, governance, organizational culture, learning ability, and stakeholder interaction. It is in these aspects that the organization can decide policies and strategies on how to behave responsibly. Externally, the coherent organization works with those who share its worldview, but it does not dictate that worldview.
- 2.
Within Islamic banking, riba can refer to the charging of interest, the charging of excessive levels of interest, or the exchange of goods in unequal quantities or qualities.
- 3.
Chrysler petitioned the US Congress to raise emissions standards on new models, aware that it would give them cost and production advantages, as they were already quite far ahead on this particular learning curve (Husted and Allen 2000). While the first-movers should be commended for their progress, it has been seen as another way of gaining economic advantage rather than any genuine concern for environmental or social considerations.
- 4.
There are of course many other definitions, probably as many as there are of CSR itself. One single Web site dealing with the mapping of stakeholders lists the Freeman definition alongside 19 more (Stakeholdermap.com 2016).
- 5.
Between 2011 and 2016, the 3500 largest publicly traded companies globally have increased emissions of greenhouse gases by 3.9% (Moorhead and Nixon 2016). To keep global warming within the 1.5-degree limit, seen by the United Nations Panel on Climate Change (UNPCC 2018) as the upper limit beyond which every half a degree will significantly increase the risks of drought, floods, heat waves and poverty for hundreds of millions of people, they should have reduced 8.4%. This is a difference of 12.3%.
- 6.
As shall be seen later, there can be multiple objectives of such a stance. Yet they too must be coherent among themselves.
- 7.
Unfortunately, there are also many examples of companies with well-developed CSR programs acting extremely irresponsibly, demonstrating how much CSR has failed to penetrate the existing paradigm of the purpose of business.
- 8.
Herein lies one of the ironies of CSR. The philanthropic element means that indeed, many companies are returning something positive to society, but without really addressing their current or future negative impacts.
- 9.
While standards vary across national jurisdictions, it is common for most types of large companies to be legally required to carry out an audit of their financial records.
- 10.
According to a 2017 study, over 90% of the world’s largest corporations now participate in non-financial reporting (KPMG International 2017).
- 11.
While this has become an increasingly common argument, (see, e.g., the study global perspectives on sustainable investing, by Schroder Investment Management Limited 2017), it is debatable how much it translates into real-life investment decision-making. A 2017 study of 438 European financial firms explored the potential effect of several aspects of assurance on the cost of capital, with results showing no correlating relationships, indicating that the European capital markets do not value assurance and that assurance does not lead to a lower cost of capital (Pennings 2017).
- 12.
This is not meant to be a discussion of coherentism as a philosophical theory. Rather, the aim is to offer to the reader an outline, or definition, of what it means for something to be coherent, and the conditions required to make it so.
- 13.
This is supported by Shogenji’s argument that coherency comes in degrees (Shogenji 1999).
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Hilliard, I. (2019). The Limitations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): A Philosophy at Odds with Its Surroundings. In: Coherency Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13523-2_1
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