Learning Objectives
• Understand corporate social responsibility (CSR) history in terms of key phenomena: issues, modes, rationales.
• Understand CSR history as a feature of key relationships between society, business and government.
• Apply these understandings in three key phases: industrialisation; the rise of the modern corporation; internationalisation.
• Understand the dynamics of CSR: its contexts, what motivates it and how it changes.
Introduction
As history is about the past, and concerns with CSR are very present, why look backwards? As Henry Ford is thought to have said, ‘History is more or less bunk’. Others contend that history enables lessons about CSR which can be applied today, warning that: ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (Santayana, 1905: 284). History also gives insights into ‘path dependencies’ whereby today's CSR is informed not just by today's agendas, but also by inherited assumptions and approaches. Moreover, an understanding of CSR in history enables you to better distinguish what is recurrent and what is novel, and to understand the significance of its different contexts.
CSR is a moving target. Over the last four millennia it has developed from its ethical underpinnings in the norms of ancient societies and religions governing the behaviour of people engaged in commerce and with wealth. Over the last two hundred years it has developed from industrial philanthropy and paternalism to more integration in the business. In the last hundred years or so it has emerged as a corporate practice, rather than leadership characteristic. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become internationalised, and responsibility has extended to issues beyond the corporation's workforce and immediate community, throughout their value chains. But the changes in business social responsibility (which we retrospectively call, CSR) over these years, decades and centuries have played out very differently in different places: CSR has a history of uneven development.
So any aspect of history could only offer a limited account of the unfolding and recursions of CSR. Hence, we offer two perspectives on how to conceptualise historical and comparative CSR. The first perspective addresses the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about CSR. Thus, we discuss its phenomena: ‘issues’, ‘modes of practice’ and ‘underlying rationales’. Second, we discuss the ‘who’ questions of CSR, focusing on the key types of CSR actor: society, business and governmental.
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