Sarwar M. Azhar and Rubeena Tashfeen, “Corporate SocialResponsibility: Future Research Directions”, Interdisciplinary Journal of
Contemporary Research in Business; Sep. 2010, Vol 2, No. 5, Business Source
Complete. Web. 22 June 2012
Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) suggests that the enterprise should not only be
responsible to create profits and bear legal responsibility for shareholders,
at the same time, but also undertake the responsibility to employees,
consumers, communities and environment. CSR requests the enterprise give up the
traditional business theory which focuses on profit as the only goal. During
the process of production, corporations need pay more attention to the value of
employees as well as the contribution to the society and environment. In order
to introduce the importance of CSR and indicate different kinds of approaches
to the research, Sarwar M. Azhar and Rubeena Tashfeen worked on this paper,
with a topic of “Corporate Social Responsibility: Future Research Directions”. In addition, stakeholders’ theory is
presented to suggest that for the establishment of research agenda, the most
significant point is stakeholders.
By taking the
proposition advancing research in CSR, the authors studies the research
approaches and analyzes the research agenda. This article also discusses the
future research direction in CSR, which indicates that an operational working
definition of CSR could be applied to the CSR concept.
Three points of theoretical
frameworks are analyzed in the field of morals management. The first point is Business Ethics which refers to the
implementation of employees’ ethics in commercial activities and specific
business situation. As professional morality, Business Ethics provide people
with a standard of behavior to identify whether the business activities act as
ethical activities. The second factor which is introduced in the article is Corporate Governance. As a company
management and control system, Corporate Governance not only set the right and
responsibility distribution for all participants, including the board of
directors, the executives, the shareholders and other stakeholders, but also
points out the rules and procedures for company affairs and decision making.
Finally Corporate Social Responsibility is studied again in order to present
some issues about CSR.
At last, the authors
indicate the stakeholders’ theory that the social welfare as the interests of
stakeholders implies the signal to maximize the profit for the corporation. Therefore,
this theory suggests the managers that the normative, the instrumental and the
empirical approached should be integrated to establish research agenda, of
which the most significant point is stakeholders. The article also suggests the
future research of CSR that need to study the prioritized social issues. Overall,
I would say that this article is very interesting to me.
It seems that now day CSR is becoming more and more popular within corporations. That said in my own personal opinion I think CSR is overrated and the corporations should only be responsible for their employees, shareholders, stake holders, and more focused on their economic output. This is assuming they are doing nothing illegal and not going out of their way to harm individuals or the environment etc… On your second to last paragraph you mentioned that CSR was studied again to present some issues about CSR, did the researchers have any significant findings that you feel would impact the way companies do business?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Jason. To some extent, CSR is more rated since the managers' incentives to increase their companies' reputation. I just reviewed the article again about the author's sinificant findings about CSR. There are several issues about CSR which are clearly introduced in the paper. By studying these issues, the author attempts to develop propositions toward effective research in the area of CSR in the developing country.
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