faulker031

[This post has now been updated with the new edition of our textbook and a new free download. Go to the post " Corporate social responsibility in a global context - a new free download "] We've just posted online our introduction to CSR from our 2008 text co-written with Laura Spence, Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in a Global Context . It's available for free download here at  the Social Science Research Network , albeit only in the pre-typeset version.  In the paper we examine the nature and definition of CSR, and its emergence in different national and organizational contexts. It should be a good basic CSR 101 for anyone trying to get their head's around the subject. Of course, the question of what corporate social responsibility (CSR) is should be pretty straighforward. It is obvious that CSR is about the stuff that companies do to improve society, right? Or at least what they do to make it less worse. Or perhaps its what they tell us the...

What does business owe the world? OK, now that's a pretty big question. Where do you even begin to start the long list of demands and grievances that are stacking up against the corporate world? But this is the question that the Harvard Business Review has posed in a new online debate launched a week or so ago. It's a provocative starting point, and not simply (as some might have expected from HBR), an excuse to really ask 'What, if anything, does business owe the world?'. With uncommon good timing, the debate kicked off with a lively exchange of blogs from invited contributors on the issue of externalities , and whether the internalizing of externalities - or moving from external to internal (e2i) costing of social impacts - is an appropriate expression of corporate responsibility. We say good timing because just as the first part of the debate was drawing to a close, the US began to experience one of its worst oil spills in history in the Gulf of Mexico. Now pollut...