Young people as company stakeholders? Moving beyond CSR…

Abstract

Purpose

The case of corporations establishing a relationship with young people – because of the moral responsibility involved – allows us to illustrate the complexities of trying to decide what is morally correct to collectively ensure children's well-being. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

Applying the “stakeholder theory” to child industries – under which term this paper includes all business activities that establish a commercial relationship involving children, either as the recipient or user of the final product or beneficiary of a specific service, or as a co-decision-maker for purchases within his/her family or social circles – reveals a series of conceptual challenges...

Findings

The limited understanding of stakeholder theory within the CSR managerial perspective leads companies to overlook some important moral issues about children's well-being, and exposes them to particularly hard criticisms of their actions and marketing policies.

Research limitations/implications

If children have been overlooked by the stakeholder theory, how may the interests of youth be represented in a stakeholder perspective?

Practical implications

To deal with some of the dilemmas entailed by considering children's representatives as legitimate spokespersons, the paper suggests drawing on the ethics of care to attempt delineating a corporate social responsibility towards young people.

Originality/value

This paper emphasises a number of issues relevant to young consumers, including the absence of children in stakeholder theory and how that absence speaks to the presumed extent and boundaries of corporate social responsibility.

Citation

de La Ville, V.-I. (2014), "Young people as company stakeholders? Moving beyond CSR…", Young Consumers, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 3-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/YC-03-2013-00363