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Article information:
To cite this document: Timothy S. Clark, Kristen N. Grantham. "What CSR is not:
Corporate Social Irresponsibility" In Corporate Social Irresponsibility: A Challenging
Concept. Published online: 2012; 23-41.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S2043-9059(2012)0000004010
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Few topics in management science have generated as much polarized controversy in recent decades as the concept of corporate social responsibility
(CSR), yet clarity remains elusive. Questions about what responsibilities
businesses have and to whom have so fractured the debate that it is conceivable that certain parties have perpetuated the use of that charged
word in order to palliate progress. Corporatists need not even engage in
debate when those who argue for CSR cannot even agree how to define
or apply it. Attempting to justify such an ambiguous ideal therefore
becomes an uphill struggle for scholars and activists who seek to reason
with corporatists that their business responsibilities to society are broad.
By pursuing this often fruitless path, many scholars and advocates who
support more comprehensive responsibilities of business have unwittingly
undermined their own cause. Worse, the unresolvable debate perpetuates
ambiguity such that CSR can be claimed by virtually any corporation
with an appealing cause and a marketing budget, which distracts attention from potentially harmful, thus far more important, aspects of their
business operations.
This chapter introduces an alternative, parallel conceptualization of
CSR meant to help distinguish the relevant factors in the relationship
between business and society, and to help provide more effective channels
for making progress for the greater good of both. While CSR may be critically ambiguous, exploration of its antithesis provides a more specifiable
construct and a corresponding continuum between CSR and what will be
called here corporate social irresponsibility (denoted as CSI). Exploration
of the CSI aspects of business offers to shed light on undesirable business
activities that may have been obscured by the focus on CSR. This shift in
focus may help businesses to recognize and avoid CSI, rather than focusing on campaigns to achieve the perception of ambiguous responsibility
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or enacting shallow and disconcerted CSR efforts that have little positive
impact on society or the bottom line.
Dozens of studies researching links between corporate social performance and financial performance have yielded incomparable results in
the unflattering sense (Griffin & Mahon, 1997)
leaving CSR a tired,
dead, and elusive construct (Griffin, 2000, p. 482). Yet it is axiomatic that
distinctly antisocial business behavior, at least when exposed and penalized
in courts of law or public opinion, tends to have profoundly negative
effects on corporations and their stakeholders (Frooman, 1997; Jones,
1995). Neither of these aspects of business activity can be as usefully considered in isolation from one another. Nor are CSR and CSI simple,
binary attributes that any given business action plainly is or is not. Rather,
by considering them as endpoints along a common continuum, gradations
of business activity can be better distinguished, studied, and addressed.
Following a section on concept development, we outline our case and
augment it with theory-based graphics to argue that redirecting focus to
CSI offers more benefit for social outcomes and positive business change
than the focus on CSR has proven heretofore. This is because (1) injunctions against specifiable negatives have tended to be more effective modulators of human behavior than general pressure to engage in positives, (2)
business activity tends to be concentrated around legal-minimum requirements, which is argued to be more characteristic of the CSI end of the continuum, and (3) coalitions of social advocates and corporatists alike can
rally around the broad, mutual benefits that come from reduction in CSI
activity. Our chapter concludes with discussion of implications for management practice, pedagogy, and research approaches to develop the
potential of this alternative conceptualization.
BACKGROUND ON CSR
In the latter decades of the 20th century, the business-and-society field of
management research addressed the challenge of ambiguities in CSR definitions by producing more theory and definitions rather than establishing
a systematic conceptual framework (Carroll, 1999). Carrolls own model,
published in 1979, integrated prior conceptions into a three-dimensional
graphic that has been influential, though, like many mere approximations
of a complex reality, it is difficult to defend and test. CSRs popularity
as an empirical topic contributed to ongoing confusion, rather than
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INTRODUCTION OF CSI
Clear definitions or arguments about CSR are no easier to derive from one
end of the literatures broad philosophical spectrum than the other. But the
large overlap of agreement highlighted above shows utility in approaching
business-responsibility questions not as a binary matter of black or white,
but as a matter of degree across a range of gray. A binary distinction has
left a large gap in understanding between activity that is illegal (presumed
to be universally considered irresponsible) and activity that fits general
standards of CSR. This is illustrated in Fig. 1, where the threshold of the
Law (shown in a dashed line to reflect its approximations and imperfections) is far to the left along a continuum of business activity generally
accepted to be CSR. This has perpetuated a large zone of equivocation
between the two, which has likely factored into the unresolved debate. By
recognizing that there are some types of business activity that could be
legal, yet fall to the left of satisfying Friedmans ethical custom or Carrolls ethical responsibilities, the equivocal zone and the range of debate
is beneficially narrowed. This is illustrated as the portion of the continuum
between the law and the right edge of what is being termed here CSI,
which shrinks the equivocal zone from the dashed bracket to the narrower
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Fig. 1.
solid bracket. The CSI concept, indicated in gray on the left-side of the
continuum in Fig. 1, facilitates this distinction and can help to shift the
debate in a constructive direction.
As the use of an illustrative continuum suggests, corporate responsibility
is not categorical but infinitely scalable. This provides a more nuanced
evaluation of business activity along a scale from one extreme to another,
with ordinal rankings providing a distinct conceptual improvement over
categorical limitations. Note that the CSI side is shown with a finite endpoint, while the CSR side is an arrow pointing off to infinity. This is
because vice, for practical purposes, is finite (else customers or communities cease to exist), while forms and extents of virtue are virtually infinite
and, therefore, impossible to specify (Boatright, 2000).
Since this open-endedness of CSR leaves it difficult to define, the utility
of the CSI concept may be judged by its improved specificity. First, illegal
activity is considered prima facie to be socially irresponsible. The law is a
clear manifestation of the wishes, expectations, and prohibitions established by societies through representative governments. Lawmaking processes and enforcement are hardly perfect, including extensive influence
from the business sector (Lehne, 2006). Laws and lawmaking bodies are
reactive in nature, and therefore cannot be expected to encompass all that
is unacceptable in behavior. This creates a lag between the recognition that
certain behaviors are undesirable and the creation or updating of laws.
CSI, in part, is that behavior that is presently legal but will eventually be
sanctioned by government. Deliberate exploitation of weaknesses in the
law fall short of the aforementioned ethical custom and responsibilities, so
are considered here to be among the characteristics of CSI.
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The ambiguity of CSR also led Armstrong (1977) to explore the effectiveness of considering its opposite in the normative managerial context:
Social responsibility is difficult to define. What should a manager do? It is easier to
look at the problem in terms of what he should not do i.e., at social irresponsibility. A socially irresponsible act is a decision to accept an alternative that is thought by
the decision maker to be inferior to another alternative when the effects upon all parties
are considered. Generally this involves a gain by one party at the expense of the total
system. (Armstrong, 1977, p. 185, emphasis in the original)
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products are aggressively marketed specifically to overcome peoples better judgment. Another net-cost-to-society results from the major oil and
automobile companies decades of resistance to conservation and alternative-fuels technology. Ever larger and less efficient vehicles have been
extensively marketed to Americans, with social costs ranging from longterm, environmental effects to degraded national security from persistent
dependence on foreign oil. Both of these types of lawful practices depend
on extracting gains from a customer base that is systematically led to
overlook the long-term ramifications of such consumption, deriving
unsustainable, exploitative profits at the expense of the larger societal system. Another example can be seen in the recent wave of predatory lending
and creative mortgages, with unsustainable gimmicks like nothing-down
loans and balloon payments. The resulting rise in foreclosures and bankruptcies, which harms individuals greatly, also degrades economic wellbeing generally, generating fleeting profits for some while negatively
impacting the rest of society.
More subtle, and perhaps most illustrative, is considering the range of
business behavior between tax evasion (definitely illegal) and tax seeking
(very rare) which is known as the vast field of tax avoidance
the gray
area in which armies of accountants and lawyers help their clients to outsmart their governments and stay steps ahead of the law, such that they can
avoid paying any more tax than the presently stipulated legal minimum.
Where tax breaks are put to use in the spirit of their intentions, directing
investment to areas of policy priorities, that activity aligns with societys
larger interests. But where loopholes and creativity are exploited, the
negative externality of companies that do not pay their fair share is a
decrease in the amount of funds available to government programs that
hurts society. Additionally, for those businesses that pay their taxes appropriately, competition with less scrupulous firms is made more difficult since
they are essentially shirking their financial responsibilities and gaining an
unfair advantage, leaving an increased tax burden to others. As explained
further below, it is less effective a communicative device, leading to less
benefit for society, to expose these business activities as not CSR than it
would be to specify and proactively censure what they are: CSI.
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that a statement is not quite accurate carries much less negative connotation than to say that it is dishonest. To say that a business is not pursuing
CSR activities is vague and of debatable importance, whereas the identification and condemnation of specifically irresponsible behaviors will likely
carry more weight and therefore have more impact.
Enter the logic of contra-position (Hurley, 1997), which can help
clarify arguments by examining what CSR is not. This tool of logic enables
clarifications and conclusions about the accuracy of a statement such as
If X then Y by examining If not Y, then not X. For example, the
statement All sophomores are undergraduates can be expressed If a
person is a sophomore, he or she must be an undergraduate. If there were
any debate about this, the contra-positive would allow us to see that If a
person is not an undergraduate, then he or she must not be a sophomore,
allowing another angle for possible resolution. This logic tool can be
applied to the more vexing questions regarding CSR by similarly switching
the order of the object and predicate terms and replacing each with their
antithesis.
The traditional mainstream argument of corporatist pundits, along the
lines of If businesses have no responsibility to society beyond meeting
legal minima, then meeting legal minima is adequate for fulfilling social
interests, can be reexamined with contra-position. The statement If
meeting legal minima is not adequate for fulfilling social interests, then
businesses have a responsibility to society in excess of meeting legal minima, shifts the query to whether businesses that merely meet legal obligations are, in aggregate, fulfilling their duties to society. Friedmans (1970)
comments discussed above suggest that he would answer no to this last
question, since he holds that adhering to ethical custom requires actions
beyond legal minima. As this is in opposition to the common position of
pundits who evoke him, the reordered question can be seen to probe
nuances and expose gaps of logic more effectively than one approach
alone.
While few pundits would attempt to defend or argue a case condoning
illegal behavior, the broad range between that legal frontier (vertical
dashed line in Fig. 1) and the ambiguous threshold of the CSR designation
leaves room for much equivocation, stalling progress. Introducing CSI on
the continuum narrows the gulf of equivocation, at least inasmuch as CSI
can be widely acknowledged as being detrimental to overall social welfare.
Illegal business activity is almost universally considered irresponsible, but
it does not follow that doing something irresponsible is certainly illegal.
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systems. As would be expected, cultural norms do impact what is considered to be irresponsible both legally and socially. For example, Google evidently found their famous internal mantra Dont Be Evil (Google, 2008)
to be a more effective than its contra-positive equivalent, Be Good,
would have been.
Fig. 2.
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Fig. 3.
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that it was evident that far more business activity is concentrated on the
CSI side of the continuum (the e lines y-value near the left-side of the
continuum), then it could be established that redirecting focus here would
at least bring relevance to a higher portion of the extant business activity.
Fig. 4 illustrates the focal point being directed to the CSR side of the
continuum.
Attention focused on the CSR side of the continuum is presumed to be
motivated by an objective to promote the adoption of CSR, as represented
graphically in Fig. 4. Increasing awareness, definitions, or evident benefits
of CSR would tend to increase y-axis concentrations of CSR-type activity,
as shown by the e1 lines increased height over the e line in the vicinity of the magnifying glass. But, assuming business activity is finite in any
given period, where will that increase draw from? The suggestion here is
that those firms who were positively predisposed toward to concept of
CSR, such as those whose business models or product offerings enable
some sort of reward for virtue (Vogel, 2005), are those most likely to
shift incrementally to the right. So, theoretically, firms would be drawn
mainly from the equivocal middle toward the right. This would tend to
shift the overall average to the right, and would provide a distinct social
benefit, but it would leave untouched the bulk of business activity. Fig. 5
illustrates turning attention to the CSI end of the spectrum.
Shifting focus to the left would be better suited to the objective of
reducing the incidence of CSI. Increased attention directed to this side of
the continuum of business activity would expose a portion of those firms
performing just within the stipulated constraints of the law. Where these
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
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Fig. 6.
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CONCLUSION
If the logic and argument in this chapter holds, then why has so much academic attention been focused on the CSR side of the topic? Why is more
written about corporations moving their activities from good to great
rather than from poor to mediocre?
Part of the explanation may lie in advantages of the status quo debate
for powerful corporatist interests that see threats in the progress of the
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Even without such advances to polish this approach, the CSI and continuum concepts are significant contributions. Already, the communicative
device has proven effective in pedagogical settings. In the classroom, a
visual aid like the continuum can stir thinking and facilitate discussions to
arrive at insights from alternative perspectives. After all, with classically
nay-saying students, or even at cocktail parties with irritating conversationalists (corporatists, perhaps), it can be quite effective to reply to indifference or opposition with a simple okay, if you are against CSR, then
what are you for? The shift can be catalytic, opening up a fresh approach
to get to the point.
Rather than introducing a nominally tangential paradigm that only
splinters the field, the concept of CSI is intended to introduce an orthogonal stream of thought that could clarify and advance the overall cause by
establishing what CSR is not. Effectively, it modifies and turns back onto
corporatists the words of their most-quoted libertarian economist: the
social responsibility of business is to not be irresponsible.
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