Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is the idea that business organizations have obligations to society that go beyond profit and legal compliance, including ethical treatment of workers, care for the environment, responsible sourcing, community investment, and transparency. Howard Bowen’s 1953 book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman is often regarded as an early foundation, and Archie Carroll proposed a pyramid of economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities. Milton Friedman famously argued that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits within the rules of the game, whereas R. Edward Freeman’s stakeholder theory contends that firms must serve all groups affected by their activities. John Elkington’s triple bottom line connected corporate performance to people, planet, and profit. Sociologists analyze the concept critically. Naomi Klein and others argue that it can serve as public relations or greenwashing that deflects regulation, while Michael Blowfield and Jedrzej Frynas examined its limits in developing countries. Neo-institutional scholars such as Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell explain adoption through pressures for legitimacy, and Michael Porter and Mark Kramer promoted creating shared value. Corporate social responsibility remains central to research on business ethics, sustainability, labor rights, regulation, and corporate power.