Corporate Social Responsibility: Instrumental Approaches for a Fruitful Interplay between Business and Society

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a hot topic in management research. There is now widespread agreement that CSR is an important means for corporations to contribute to a fruitful interplay between business and society. Although CSR has an inherently normative foundation, the mainstream CSR discussion is rooted in an instrumental paradigm, within which scholars oft aim to uncover the business case for CSR, i.e. address the question whether and how CSR improves the corporate bottom line. In combination with the relative neglect of the normative foundation of CSR, the instrumentality of the debate results in the problematic tendency to reduce the notion of the social responsibility of business to single CSR activities that pay off for corporations. By implication, those CSR action fields for which the business case cannot be established in a straightforward fashion tend to receive little attention. Because in reality, many CSR action fields do not yield a readily discernible business case, the present debate is limited in its ability to provide guidance on how corporations can promote a fruitful interplay between business and society. In light of this, the present dissertation aims to contribute to the CSR discussion by developing instrumental approaches that explicitly enable CSR action fields without a readily discernible business case to be identified and addressed, both in theory and in practice. Collectively, the six papers collected in the present dissertation thesis indicate that for CSR to contribute to a fruitful interplay between business and society, it is important to approach CSR in a holistic fashion and conceptualize it as a management philosophy.