Reframing Corporate Social Responsibility

"Sharply crafted and refreshingly forthright, this edited collection is easily the most incisive scholarly treatment of the rhetoric and reality of 'Corporate Social Responsibility' (CSR) produced since the depths of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007-8. It is also the first in what promises to be (under William Sun's expert editorial guidance) a steady flow of high-quality multi-author volumes addressing front-of-mind issues in corporate responsibility, governance and sustainability from a critical yet constructive perspective. If is incontestable that GFC exposed with brutal clarity the depths of corporate irresponsibility and regulatory ineptitude in western market economies, it is also plausible to argue - as do the 13 chapter contributions in this book - that the crisis also laid bare the underlying contradictions and limitations of pre-crisis approaches to CSR. In 2008, CSR (as then conceptualised and practised) was tested and found to wanting - perhaps even exacerbating the crisis rather than ameliorating it. This fine volume offers intelligent and lateral explains as to why this may have been so, as well as providing informed and thoughtful suggestions as to how CSR discourse and practice might be transformed for the greater good. As the volume's editors assert, the overriding conceptual and policy challenge is to reframe CSR from being an optional extra to an 'embedded' ethical imperative, integral to and inseparable from business discourse and values. Here is a book, then, that is designed both to unsettle and to assure; a book that should surely be mandatory reading for every business executive, every business student, and every business academic. Dr John Shields, Professor of Human Resource Management and Organisational Studies, The University of Sydney Business School"

• List of Tables.List of Figures. List of Boxes. Acknowledgments. Reframing corporate social responsibility. The nature of responsibility and the credit crunch. The role of corporate social responsibility in the financial crisis. Corporate social irresponsibility: The role of government and ideology. Performance management and neo-liberal labour market governance: the case of the UK. Who is responsible for the financial crisis? Lessons from a separation thesis. Crisis, rescue, and corporate social responsibility under American corporate law. Institutionalisation of corporate social responsibility in the corporate governance code: The new trend of the Dutch model. When should companies voluntarily agree to stop doing things that are legal and profitable but ‘socially useless’; and would they ever?. The dark side of social capital: Lessons from the Madoff case. CSR 2.0: from the age of greed to the age of responsibility. Dying of consumption? Voluntary simplicity as an antidote to hypermaterialism. Corporate social responsibility in developing countries: polish perspective. Editorial Advisory and Review Board. List of Contributors. Critical Studies on Corporate Responsibility, Governance and Sustainability. Critical Studies on Corporate Responsibility, Governance and Sustainability. Copyright page.