http://conservationfinance.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/what-is-corporate-social-responsibility/ Lars Christian Smith Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:26:21 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://conservationfinance.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/what-is-corporate-social-responsibility/#comment-199 Voluntary agreements and corporate social responsibility « Natural Capital Tue, 19 Sep 2006 19:31:20 +0000 http://conservationfinance.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/what-is-corporate-social-responsibility/#comment-199 [...] They find that a voluntary agreement changes the industry’s dynamic abatement investment pattern, eliminating investment in an early period but increasing it in a later period. Their analysis provides a new rationale for the use of voluntary agreements that may be of considerable importance in developing and transition countries where regulatory capacity is weak.   One could also examine corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a Coasian solution, and Geoffrey Heal does just that (see Conservation Finance). Heal’s definition is useful but how much currency does CSR have?  Not much according to van Oosterhout and Heugens. They argue that “the case for CSR as a theoretical concept in social science and the humanities is weak if not outright fatal”. They go on to show that:  that no satisfactory intensional definition of CSR—one that specifies with precision and clarity which conjunction of attributes makes up the concept—is available or to be expected. Equally pitiful is that each of the available extensive definitions of CSR—which are supposed to point out the real-life phenomena to which the concept refers—is troubled by one or several of four operationalization problems…An even more serious, however, is that more than fifty years of CSR research and theory building has not resulted in a systematic relationship between the notion’s intension or theoretical conceptualizations, on the one hand, and its extension or empirical operationalizations, on the other. In the absence of such a systematic relationship one can take neither CSR theory building, nor empirical research on CSR, very seriously. But what seals CSR’s fate, in our view, is the notion’s redundancy in both positive and normative theorizing in business and society. We have demonstrated only its redundancy in positive theorizing in the present contribution, but there is no reason to assume that it will fare better in normative theory.  [...] [...] They find that a voluntary agreement changes the industry’s dynamic abatement investment pattern, eliminating investment in an early period but increasing it in a later period. Their analysis provides a new rationale for the use of voluntary agreements that may be of considerable importance in developing and transition countries where regulatory capacity is weak.   One could also examine corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a Coasian solution, and Geoffrey Heal does just that (see Conservation Finance). Heal’s definition is useful but how much currency does CSR have?  Not much according to van Oosterhout and Heugens. They argue that “the case for CSR as a theoretical concept in social science and the humanities is weak if not outright fatal”. They go on to show that:  that no satisfactory intensional definition of CSR—one that specifies with precision and clarity which conjunction of attributes makes up the concept—is available or to be expected. Equally pitiful is that each of the available extensive definitions of CSR—which are supposed to point out the real-life phenomena to which the concept refers—is troubled by one or several of four operationalization problems…An even more serious, however, is that more than fifty years of CSR research and theory building has not resulted in a systematic relationship between the notion’s intension or theoretical conceptualizations, on the one hand, and its extension or empirical operationalizations, on the other. In the absence of such a systematic relationship one can take neither CSR theory building, nor empirical research on CSR, very seriously. But what seals CSR’s fate, in our view, is the notion’s redundancy in both positive and normative theorizing in business and society. We have demonstrated only its redundancy in positive theorizing in the present contribution, but there is no reason to assume that it will fare better in normative theory.  [...]

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