David Bruce Allen

Is It Ethical to Use Ethics as Strategy

Increasingly research in the field of business and society suggests that ethics and corporate social responsibility can be profitable. Yet this work raises a troubling question: Is it ethical to use ethics and social responsibility in a strategic way? Is it possible to be ethical or socially responsible for the wrong reason? In this article, we define a strategy concept in order to situate the different approaches to the strategic use of ethics and social responsibility found in the current literature. We then analyze the ethics of such approaches using both utilitarianism and deontology and end by defining limits to the strategic use of ethics.

Governance Choice for Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Evidence From Central America

The decision to internalize corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, to buy (outsource) them in the form of corporate philanthropy, or to collaborate with other organizations is of great significance to the ability of the firm to reap benefits from such activity. Using insights provided by organizational economics and the resource-based view of the firm, this article describes how CSR centrality affects governance choice. This framework is tested using data collected from Central America. The findings suggest that the higher the centrality of CSR activities to the firms’ mission, the more likely that the firms will engage in CSR internally. The article discusses directions for further research and concludes with the managerial implications of this research.

Corporate Social Strategy: Is corporate social strategy ethical?

The differential characteristic of corporate social strategy is the objective of pursuing both social value creation and economic value creation through social action projects. Moreover, we go so far as to argue that when social action projects achieve both ends, firms will be encouraged to make additional social investments and that economic value creation is positively correlated with sustainable social action. We also believe that corporate social strategy and corporate social responsibility are compatible. This belief is by no means shared by many business and society academics. The traditional definition of CSR precludes the pursuit of profit when firms engage in social action projects. This is an important point that should not be obscured by the research of a number of authors arguing that corporate social performance is positively related to business performance (Cochran and Wood, 1984; McGuire et al ., 1988; Hosmer, 1994b; Waddock and Graves, 1997; Margolis and Walsh, 2003). This positive relationship is understood as an unintended yet felicitous outcome. All of us with some experience in CSR have heard repeatedly from The Global Compact, Business for Social Responsibility, The Caux Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce, etc., that doing good is good business. Who, on the other hand, has sighted a CEO jumping up to declare that the reason to do good is because it is profitable?

Corporate Social Strategy: The future of social strategy

February 1, 2015. CNN Breaking News! Grameen Telemedicine IPO breaks all records . The Grameen Group has just announced that it has raised a record US

Corporate Social Strategy: From stakeholder management to social strategy

100 billion in the initial public offering of its Grameen Telemedicine subsidiary. Grameen Telemedicine combines internet-based health services with recently developed revolutionary diagnostics, which permit the diagnosis of most common diseases in a matter of minutes through a simple analysis of urine, blood, and saliva. Medical doctors located in centers throughout South Asia analyze the results and provide diagnoses through internet to locations, remote and not-so-remote. Grameen Telemedicine has become the Wal-Mart of medicine, with whom it is expected to partner in order to provide healthcare services in most of the retail giant’s superstores.

Corporate social responsibility in the multinational enterprise: strategic and institutional approaches

A stakeholder in an organization is (by its definition) any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objective. Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach , (1984: 25) The social strategy decision Thanks to Professor Freeman’s considerable efforts, the term stakeholder is now a standard part of the business lexicon. Unfortunately, despite Freeman’s insistence that shareholders and stakeholders are on the same side, the term stakeholder is used most often in an adversarial context: shareholders and their CEO hired guns are pitted against the stakeholders – i.e., everybody else. Freeman’s core argument – that in the long term the firm’s success depends on satisfying legitimate non-economic as well as economic stakeholders – has not convinced microeconomists and strategic management scholars. Legitimacy is the crux of the issue. In a series of Academy of Management Review articles, Thomas Jones (Jones, 1995; Jones and Wicks, 1999; Jones et al ., 2007) has made a laudable effort to reconcile normative and instrumental stakeholder management theory by demonstrating that both are necessary and possible. In his most recent paper, he builds on Phillips’ (2003) work on normative and derivative legitimacy to defend, via the former, meeting the ethical demands of stakeholders, and, by the latter, acceding to the demands of powerful stakeholders that may harm the organization and/or other legitimate stakeholders (Jones et al ., 2007: 142). Nonetheless, there still remains the quarter-century-old problem of stakeholder theory when it comes to navigating conflicting normative (ethical) and instrumental objectives. In response, Jones et al . (2007) define a typology of organizational ethical cultures and provide propositions on how each type will respond to stakeholder groups under different conditions of stakeholder salience. The model is descriptive, predicts when a particular type of ethical culture will pay attention to specific types of stakeholders, but it cannot claim to advance the prospect of firm ethical behavior or of stakeholders benefiting from firm responsiveness to their needs. As has often been the case in stakeholder research, the authors suggest that creating trust through ethical behavior will redound to the firm’s benefit. However, they cannot make an economic case for ethical stakeholder management, nor explain how stakeholder management creates competitive advantage and economic value.