The world and its natural laws interact with human societies to affect the health, activity, life, and well-being of all living things. Different natural components of the earth interrelate to determine how the human can make choices to support sustainable development . Scientific principles are applied to create inventions to support human progress and to establish a sense of community that supports human endeavors. On the other hand, organizations are also established to address the needs of communities via viable use of finite resources through economic exchanges. Mobilization of economic activities relies on systems of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Satisfying the diverse interests of living things is dependent on a complex balance of interconnected factors. The organizations set corporate missions, establish code of ethics, and develop crucial resource capabilities in order to deploy and share better the finite resources with other living things.
Economic growth, social progress, and ecological balance are the fundamental components of sustainable development . An organization, be it public or private, is not detached from the society and the natural environment . Given the tight interconnectedness of human-made systems, communities, and environments, it is an uphill task for the organizations to balance the diverse interests of their stakeholders in a fast-changing world. Living up ethically to the sound corporate responsibilities whether can be something that actually has a bottom-line payoff for the organizations remains an enigma. Hence, there is an urgency to look into the roles and manners of modern organizations in building a better future without forsaking universal principles .
People cling on to or thrust aside social artifacts. Exploration and exploitation with local and international mindedness can lead to new understandings, opportunities, and changes. The object of management is a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose. Management always deals with the nature of man, and with good and evil (Drucker and Maciariello 2004). Its process in essence is a system of interdependency (Miller and Whitney 1999). Pragmatic management upholds the output, often justifying the inputs in terms of the results. Corporate mishaps imperil modern enterprisesā influence on others through morality practices. Accounting irregularities, insider trading, and misuse of entrusted power for personal gains, as reflected in the corporate failures around the world, still pervasive in the behavioral inputs to the modern management processes (Atkinson and Field 1995; Hui 2008, 2010). The pervasiveness of such phenomena in all kinds of human-run organization can become an evolving organizational disease that impairs a firmās long-term corporate sustainability . As such, morality is still an issue of general concern especially where the orthodox world of organizing is increasingly subjected to disordering. The existence of such trends provides another new opportunity to understand organizations and to build more encompassing theories and practices on corporate responsibility.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the fruits of affluent. The current troubled world economies, corporate failures, and geopolitical environments suggest that the perspective needs to be recalibrated. As the steward of the earth, the human ought to safeguard the continuous fruitfulness of the finite resources by developing all potentialities built into the natural world (Atkinson and Field 1995; Hui 2008, 2010).
1.1 Purpose Statement, Aim, and Objectives
1.1.1 Purpose Statement
Milton Friedman (1970), a recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, argues that the primary social responsibility of business is to increase its profit without deception. There have been several works written to point out the limitations of his works especially in a more agile kind of economy (Denning 2013; Grant 1991; Husted and Salazar 2006; Mulligan 1986). A firm develops, acquires, and utilizes resources to create the capability to endure. An unspoken key tenet of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is that the society, within which the firm operates, grants it the license to operate. Unfortunately, the unyielding need to maximize shareholder wealth has triggered corporate failures (Chatterjee 2003; Jackson et al. 2013). In real world, any practice with a negative externality that causes other to take a significant loss without consent or compensation, can be seen as unethical (Cosans 2009). The firms ought to attain sustainability through balancing the complex relationship between current economic, environmental, and social needs, also known as triple bottom line , in a manner that does not compromise future needs (The Global Reporting Initiative [TGRI] 2002). Also, presenting business as a combative pursuit may not be practical in the social era that would reward fluid organizations and transient competitive advantage (McGrath 2013; Merchant 2012). A responsible competitive advantage does not monopolize, but create healthy competition in the long run that motivates other firms to provide even better goods and services (Hui 2008). Separately and together, the above developments raise a relatively noble set of issues in CSR research to address the question of what is the role of a firm in society.
A firm essentially is a strategic management system, concerned with deciding on an actionable strategy for organizational effectiveness and environment adaptation. Confirming and disconfirming in a stand-alone context is incomplete to explain the strategic value of CSR. There have been concerns associated with some prominent yet futuristic CSR paradigms with: (a) limited empirical testing; (b) confinement largely to specific projects and products rather than the entire firm; (c) incomplete CSR definition constructs used in explaining what constitutes multidimensional aspects of CSR; and (e) the tension between maximizing profit for shareholders and optimizing returns for stakeholders (Crane et al. 2014). In the current lackluster global economic and geopolitical environments, it is critical therefore to consider the consequences of the aforesaid concerns, and to re-examine the adequacy of the existing CSR models that may not bode well for societies, ecologies, and firms.
That said, it is compelling to explore the current state of CSR being practiced in major firms, in particular seeing the CSR intent, planning, implementation, and evaluation processes, and how the CSR initiative changes as the process of implementing and thinking about it changes over time. To date, there has been little known about the areas as an integrated, holistic process for sustained value creation . The actual position and the interactive process of a typical CSR planning cycle within the firmsā larger corporate strategic planning process, and the firmsā strategic actions on their CSR performance also require fur...