4.1 Three views of csr (corporate social responsibility)  (Page 8/8)

Town x committee for economic development

• Your town, Town X, has three Burger Man franchises. Representatives from the town council are participating in the board meeting in order to ensure that Burger Man's policies on corporate social responsibility enhance the town's economic welfare and development.
• What are your stakes? What are your roles and responsibilities?
• What kind of services and products do you provide for Burger Man? What benefits do your community draw from Burger Man? How can Burger Man activities and policies promote or demote your town's interests and stakes?
• Develop a position paper for the board meeting that addresses these issues? Pay special attention to the goods and risks that your town exchanges with Burger Man.

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Exercises in csr

• Participate in the Burger Man Stakeholder Meeting
• Take your assigned stakeholder group and prepare a short presentation(five minutes maximum) on your stakeholder's interests, rights, needs, and vulnerabilities.
• Listen to the stakeholder presentations from the other groups. Try to avoid a competitive stance. Instead, look for commonalities and shared interests. You may want to form coalitions with one or more of the other groups.
• Switch from the stakeholder role to that of Burger Man management. You are responsible for developing a comprehensive corporate social responsibility program for Burger Man. You job is to integrate the concerns expressed by the stakeholders in their presentation and form your plan around this integration.
• Try to resolve conflicts. If you cannot and are forced to prioritize, then you still must find a way of recognizing and responding to each legitimate stakeholder stake. You may want to refer to the "Ethics of Team Work" module (m13760) to look for time-tested methods for dealing with difficult to reconcile stake. These include setting quotas, negotiating interests, expanding the pie, nonspecific compensation, logrolling, cost-cutting and bridging. You should be able to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have made every attempt to recognize and integrate every legitimate stakeholder stake.

What did you learn?

This module and two others (A Short History of the Corporation and Corporate Governance) are designed to help you understand the corporate context of business. In this section, you should reflect on three questions: (1) What have you learned about the social responsibilities of corporations? (2) What still perplexes you about the social responsibilities of corporations. (3) Do you find one model of CSR better than the others? (4) Can these models of CSR be combined in any way?

Appendix

Corporate social responsibility frameworks: seminal papers

1. Friedman, M. (1970) "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in New York Times Magazine , September 13, 1970.
2. Evan, W.M. and Freeman, E. (1988) Ä Stakeholder Theory of the Modern Corporation: Kantian Capitalism" in Beauchamp and Bowie 1988.
3. Friedman 1970 and Evan and Freeman 1988 can be found in: Beauchamp, T.L. and Bowie, N.E., editors. (1988) Ethical Theory and Business, 3rd Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall: 87-91 and 97-106.
4. See Werhane 2007 and 2008 below

References

1. Collins, J.C., Porras, J. I. (1994) Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies . New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
2. Stone, C. D. (1975) Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior. Prospectr Heights, IL: Waveland Press, INC: 1-30.
3. Des Jardins, J.R. (1993) Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company: 37.
4. Clarke, T. (2004) "Introduction: Theories of Governance--Reconceptualizing Corporate Governance Theory After the Enron Experience," in Theories of Corporate Governance: The Philosophical Foundations of Corporate Governance, ed. Thomas Clarke. New York: Routledge: 1-30.
5. Donaldson, T. (1993) The Ethics of International Business . New York: Oxford University Press.
6. French, P.A. (1984) Collective and Corporate Responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press.
7. French, P.A. (1997) "Corporate Moral Agency" in Werhane, P.H., and Freeman, R.E. Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell: 148-151.
8. May, L. (1987) The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
9. Werhane, P. H. (2008) "Mental Models: Moral Imagination and System Thinking in the Age of Globalization," in Journal of Business Ethics, 78: 463--474.
10. Werhane, P. (2007) "Corporate Social Responsibility/Corporate Moral Responsibility: Is There a Difference and the Difference It Makes," in eds., May, S., Cheney, G., and Roper, J., The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 459-474.
11. Fisse, B. and French, P.A., eds. (1985) Corrigible Corporations and Unruly Law. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press.
12. Nader, R. and Green, M.J., eds. (1973) Corporate Power in America. New York: Grossman.
13. Nader,, R. Green, M. and Seligman, J. (1976) Taming the Giant Corporation. New York: Norton.
14. Davis, M. (1998) Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 119-156. Jackall, R. (1988) Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
15. Carol, A. B., "Social Responsibility," in Werhane, P., and Freeman, R. E., eds. (1997, 1998) Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, INC: 593-595.
16. Dyrud, M.A. (2007) "Ethics, Gaming, and Industrial Training," in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. Winter 2007: 36-44.
17. Ritz, Dean. (2007) "Can Corporate Personhood Be Socially Responsible?" in eds. May, S., Cheney, G., and Roper, J., Corporate Governance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 194-195.

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