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Does CSR Limit Our Understanding of Business Ethics?

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Progress in Ethical Practices of Businesses

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Abstract

Over the last three decades, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a key topic both in scholarly research and in business practice. However, the way how such kind of social responsibility is ‘conducted’ in the business world is based on a wrong understanding of ethics and has distracted from the original intention of the CSR debate. CSR has become a managerial discipline based on an instrumental logic. As we will outline in our contribution, at least three developments deserve critical attention in this context: (1) A strict orientation towards predefined standards, (2) following a pure governance logic when implementing CSR and (3) using CSR as a means for the symbolic adoption of responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Michael S. Aßländer & Stefanie Kast

Authors
  1. Michael S. Aßländer
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  2. Stefanie Kast
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Correspondence to Michael S. Aßländer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Organization, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Marta Peris-Ortiz

  2. Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Patricia Márquez

  3. School of Business, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Jaime Alonso Gomez

  4. Graduate School of Business, Mexicali, Mexico

    Mónica López-Sieben

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Aßländer, M.S., Kast, S. (2021). Does CSR Limit Our Understanding of Business Ethics?. In: Peris-Ortiz, M., Márquez, P., Gomez, J.A., López-Sieben, M. (eds) Progress in Ethical Practices of Businesses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60727-2_3

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