Question: Introduction: We have seen that the business community is intensely criticized. Journalist Daniel Seligman put it this way:
A standard view of the American corporation is that it is an efficient deliverer of goods and services, yet also a wellspring of social injustice. Driven by a narrow calculus of profits, it is oblivious to the common good. And so, the litany goes, it degrades the environment, promotes unsafe products, skimps on workplace safety and lays off workers who have given it years of service.83
That broadly shared perception of business misdeeds or indifference, in conjunction with the growing influence of business values throughout American life, has led in recent decades to the development of the doctrine of corporate social responsibility (CSR-sometimes also referred to as corporate citizenship). We can express the issue this way: Must business decision making include consideration not merely of the welfare of the firm but of society as a whole? For most contemporary readers, the answer is self-evident-of course business bears a social responsibility. Business has enjoyed a central and favored role in American life. As such, it must assume a measure of the burden for the welfare of the total society. Indeed, businesspeople themselves now generally endorse businesses' responsibility to help solve society's problems. The popular appeal and potential power of CSR is evident, for example, in a 2008 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey finding that 88 percent of millennials will choose employers based on strong social responsibility values and that 86 percent would think about leaving a company whose CSR values did not meet their expectations.84 Similar philosophies such as the triple bottom line (giving close accounting attention to social and environmental performance as well as financial performance) and the sustainable corporation (operating the business with a focus on environmentally sensitive practices that will husband scarce resources and maintain a healthy community now and in the future) have powerful appeal to many students and managers. Before turning to a more detailed analysis of corporate social responsibility practice, let's think about options you might employ to direct your forthcoming professional life toward socially responsible, ethically sustainable business practice. Social enterprise or social entrepreneurship is a movement in which people launch nonprofits and businesses or take jobs using entrepreneurial and managerial skills for the purpose, in part, of addressing social problems.
Social Enterprise/Social Entrepreneurship Drew Chafetz, in his mid-twenties and a huge soccer fan, did not turn directly to the job market following college graduation. Rather, he cofounded love.futbol [see https://www.lovefutbol .org], an organization to help build safe soccer fields for children in impoverished nations who otherwise might be forced to play in the streets or other unsafe spaces. Since founding love.futbol in 2006, Chafetz and his cofounder, Alfredo Axtmayer, have encouraged about a dozen communities in Guatemala and Brazil to build durable, low-maintenance, concrete soccer pitches, and several other projects are in development. Chafetz says that love.futbol's core competency is not building fields but empowering and mobilizing communities to build their own. Love.futbol provides materials and direction, but communities must provide the land, project planning, and volunteer labor necessary for success.85 Others share Chafetz's social welfare goals but are pursuing them from a profit-seeking direction. T-shirt and hoodie maker Sevenly, for example, donates $7 to charitable causes for each item sold. Beer halls, pledged to donate their profits to charity, are springing up around America and in other nations. Some of those committed to social welfare simply seek jobs that allow them to apply their expertise and z eal directly to community causes. Dawn Carpenter gave up her high-paying job at JP Morgan to work for a small District of Columbia community bank whose customers include D.C. Habitat for Humanity and Bread for the City. Carpenter said she "needed to put over two decades of experience to work for my mission."86 Still others believe they can make socially responsible contributions by taking mainstream, high-paying jobs that help build power stations in developing nations, improve financing opportunities for inner-city entrepreneurs, or enable medical care to more affordably reach poorer patients, for example. [For an introduction to B Corps-benefit corporations-a "new type of corporation that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems," see https://www.bcorporation.net/about]
Questions
1. a. Do you aspire to a social enterprise/social entrepreneurship role in your future professional life?
b. Should you? Explain.
2. Have your business school courses given sufficient attention to social responsibility issues? Explain.
3. Do consumers care whether companies are socially responsible? Explain.