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Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

This chapter reviews some of the cohesive concepts raised in the recent literature regarding normative dialogues between business and society. The purpose is to draw a few meaningful implications toward formulating new guiding philosophies for interaction between large global businesses and society in general. As these concepts tend to counterbalance the preponderance of the pure free market ideology and the traditional understanding of cultural segregation, the chapter's discussion thereof should help synthesize divergent arguments into a unified framework for business–society interface in this globalized environment.

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the Bombay textile mills of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to provide an account of the roots of business–society relationship in India and contribute to postcolonial perspectives on corporate social responsibility (CSR). This search is premised on the understanding that India has embarked on industrialisation from a set of productive relations that differ from European feudalism.

The data for this study have been obtained from published works on Bombay Textile Mills such as Chandavarkar (1994, 2008), Morris (1965), Wolcott (2008) and Clark (1999) and some Annual Reports of Bombay Mill Owners Association. Further Kydd (1920) has been used for history of factory legislation in India.

Evidence suggests that practices in mills were informed by notions of custom and fairness, which resulted in flexible hours, socially acceptable wage outcomes and work sharing. Individual reputations built through use of discretion within networks of patronage spanned both workplace and neighbourhood, interlinking the social, ethical, political and economic lives of owners, jobbers and workers. Jobbers’ authority was earned in return for providing support to a production process, mirroring Birla’s (2009) “layered sovereignty” differing markedly from delegated managerial authority. Workers’ share in surplus value was important along with autonomy, both of which were negotiated through customary networks and protest.

The paper suggests that a postcolonial approach to CSR implies an expansive notion of responsibility that goes beyond a Western focus on wages to encompass worker autonomy and countervailing power. Postcolonial accounts of CSR history can only be understood as emerging from a triadic interaction of imperial interest, subordinated native business and native societal relationships. This contrasts with conventional approaches that look at CSR’s emergence simply as a process internal to that society. Account of Indian CSR trajectory is in part a journey of native business from responsible practices to a messy tessellation of legal exploitation and illegal customary concerns.

The findings of this paper suggest that it is possible that customary practices of care and concern might still be surviving in Indian business even if only in the illegal and informal realm. Thus CSR programs in the Indian context might be useful to bring to centre stage these customary practices.

This study documents the evolution of business–society relations in a post-colonial context and shows how they are different from the Western trajectory.

Rob van Tulder is Professor of International Business-Society Management at the Rotterdam School of Management/Erasmus University Rotterdam. He holds a PhD degree (cum laude) in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam. He has been visiting professor at a number of universities and consultant to international organisations (such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union), multinational enterprises, non-governmental organisations and ministries around the world. He is co-founder of the department of Business-Society Management, one of the leading departments in the world studying and teaching about the contribution of business and society. He founded the SCOPE databank project, which in collaboration with UNCTAD compiles the listings of the world's largest multinational enterprises from developed and developing countries. Every year this list is published and referred as ‘UNCTAD/Erasmus University databank’. Dr. van Tulder is co-founder of the Expert Centre on Sustainable Business and Development Cooperation and rotating chair of the Department of Business-Society Management. Rob is presently also academic director of the Partnerships Resource Centre (http://www.partnershipsresourcecentre.org), which studies the cross-sector partnerships between firms, NGOs and government for sustainable development. The Resource Centre itself is organised as a partnership among business schools, multinational enterprises, governments and NGOs.

The design and implementation of an interpretive framework to study historically marginalized issues in management is a distinct area of research. This paper aims to propose a multi-method interpretive framework, integrating a historiographical approach and an archival investigation, and use the case of business responses to disability in colonial and post-independence India to elucidate the proposed framework.

This paper provides a summary of a proposed framework for the historical study of marginalized social issues using an interpretive paradigm. It also outlines the advantages and limitations of the proposed framework.

This paper makes a methodological contribution in multi-method interpretive research design for the historical study of socially constructed issues, neglected because of deep prejudice and social exclusion, that offer complex challenges for modern businesses seeking inclusive workplace strategies.

This paper proposes a research framework that contextualizes social issues in history (historiographical study) and cases of business responses to these issues (archival study) for the examination of historically marginalized issues in the business–society relationship.

Industrial revolutions have been induced by technological advances, but fundamentally changed business and society. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the fourth industrial revolution (I4.0) and derive guidelines for business strategy, it is, therefore, necessary to explore it as a multi-facet phenomenon. Most literature on I4.0, however, takes up a predominantly technical view. This paper aims to report on a project discussing a holistic view on I4.0 and its implications, covering technology, business, society and people.

Two consecutive group discussions in form of academic world cafés have been conducted. The first workshop gathered multi-disciplinary experts from academia, whose results were further validated in a subsequent workshop including industry representatives. A voting procedure was used to capture participants perspectives.

The paper develops a holistic I4.0 vision, focusing on five core technologies, their business potential, societal requests and people implications. Based on the model a checklist has been developed, which firms can use a tool to analyze their firm’s situation and draft their industry 4.0 business strategy.

Rather than focusing on technology alone – which by itself is unlikely to make up for a revolution – this research integrates the entire system. In this way, a tool-set for strategy design results.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the emergence of CSR in Afghanistan as a novel context in the South-Asian CSR debate.

The findings of the paper are based on case studies of four corporations in the Afghan mobile telecommunications industry. Multiple sources of qualitative data are coded according to the analytical framework of the paper to generate the findings.

The findings highlight that the Afghan national setting can be conceptualised as an “area of limited statehood” indicating the weak national institutional setting, which enables space for manoeuvring for non-state actors to play a pivotal role in business-society relations. The paper highlights that the CSR practices are driven by the multi-level organisational field that through a unique blend of global coercive, mimetic and normative pressures lead to convergence around explicit CSR themes.

The findings are based on CSR practices that are explicitly stated and do not include informal and/or implicit business-society practices in such contexts.

This paper combines the literature on areas of limited statehood and the neo-institutional theory to explain the emergence of CSR the Afghan mobile telecommunications industry. The paper advocates for a shift from a national setting focus to a multi-level institutional field lens in providing contextualised explanation of the emergence of CSR in developing countries.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and provide an overview of the topic of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The approach is to present an introduction to the importance of the topic and a review of the concept’s evolution and development which includes an exploration of the topic’s meaning and competing and complementary frameworks which are related. Among these related concepts are the following: business ethics, stakeholder management, sustainability, corporate citizenship, creating shared value, conscious capitalism, and purpose-driven business. These concepts are frequently used interchangeably with CSR, and they have more in common than differences. At their core, each embraces value, balance, and accountability. The chapter also explores a number of key research avenues that are quite contemporary. Among these, the following topics are addressed: political CSR; the CSP–CFP relationship and business case for CSR; upstream/downstream CSR; CSR in emerging economies, corporate social activism, and corporate social irresponsibility. In the final analysis, it is argued that the topic of CSR continues to be on an upward and sustainable trajectory in both conceptual development and practice.