We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The last couple of decades have seen the interplay of two strong and potentially competing meta-discourses about organisations and the factors that ought to shape their behaviour. The first and more established discourse – associated with the rational, economic notion of ‘shareholder value’ – sees the interests of the shareholder as paramount and encourages managers to privilege only those strategies and decisions that directly benefit shareholders in the short term. At the same time, a second discourse – ‘corporate social responsibility’ or CSR – speaks of a range of legitimate claims on the organisation and suggests that social, ethical and moral considerations ought to play a more significant role in corporate strategic planning and decision-making.
The Economist, one of the world's leading business magazines, recently published a major and critical review of corporate social responsibility, noting with alarm that ‘if businessmen had a clearer understanding of the CSR mindset and its defects, they would be better at their jobs and everybody else would be more prosperous. Simply put, advocates of CSR work from the [false] premise that unadorned capitalism fails to serve the public interest’ (Anon. 2005: 11).
While influential publications such as The Economist consider shareholder value and CSR to be conflicting and incompatible views of the organisation, recent literature has downplayed the suggested mutual exclusivity between the two discourses. For instance, there has been a growing tendency to present CSR as helping to serve ‘instrumental’ organisational purposes (for example Jones 1995; Garriga & Mele 2004).
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.