Synopses & Reviews
Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume available on the question of just how "social" business ought to be. The volume includes contributions from the fields of communication, business, law, sociology, political science, economics, accounting, and environmental studies. Moreover, it draws from experiences and examples from around the world, including but not limited to recent corporate scandals and controversies in the U.S. and Europe. A number of the chapters examine closely the basic assumptions underlying the philosophy of socially responsible business. Other chapters speak to the practical challenges and possibilities for corporate social responsiblilty in the twenty-first century. One of the most distinctive features of the book is its coverage of the very ways that the issue of corporate social responsibility has been defined, shaped, and discussed in the past four decades. That is, the editors and many of the authors are attuned to the persuasive strategies and formulations used to talk about socially responsible business, and demonstrate why the talk matters. For example, the book offers a careful analysis of how certain values have become associated with the business enterprise and how particular economic and political positions have been established by and for business. This book will be of great interest to scholars, business leaders, graduate students, and others interested in the contours of the debate over what role large-scale corporate commerce should take in the future of the industrialized world.
About the Author
Steve May is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also currently a Leadership Fellow at the Institute for the Arts and the Humanities and an Ethics Fellow at the Parr Ethics Center, and serves as an ethics researcher and consultant for the Ethics at Work program at Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics. His most recent books include
Case Studies in Organizational Communication: Ethical Perspectives and Practices and
Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research: Multiple Perspectives. He is a past forum editor of
Management Communication Quarterly.
George Cheney is Pforessor of Communication at the University of Utah, where he also serves as Director of Peace and Conflict Studies. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor of Management Communication at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Cheney has authored, co-authored, or co-edited five books and he had published over 75 journal articles and book chapters. Recognized for both teaching and research, he has lectured, conducted research, and consulted in Western Europe and Latin America, in addition to the United States and New Zealand. He is a past chair of the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association and is a reviews editor for Organization.
Juliet Roper is Professor of Management Communication at the Waikato Management School, University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She is currently the Sustainability Convenor for the Waikato Management School and representative for the school's membership in the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS). She is co-author of The Politics of Representation: Election Campaigning and Proportional Representation, and has published articles in many journals, including the Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, the Journal of Applied Communication Research,and the Journal of Public Affairs and Corporate Governance.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Contributors
Overview, George Cheney, Juliet Roper, and Steve May
PART I: Introduction
1. Why Corporate Social Responsibility: Why Now? How?, Jill J. McMillan
2. A New Generation of Global Corporate Social Responsibility, Michael Stohl, Cynthia Stohl, and Nikki C. Townsley
3. Progressing From Corporate Social Responsibility to Brand Integrity, Malcolm McIntosh
PART II: Cases and Contexts
4. Facing Corporate Power, Jem Bendell and Mark Bendell
5. Corporate Citizenship: The Dark-Side Paradoxes of Success, Sandra Waddock
6. Corporate Social Responsibility in Scandinavia: A Turn Towards the Business Case?, Mette Morsing, Atle Middtun, and Karl Palmas
7. Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia: A Confucian Context, Glen Whelan
8. Corporate Social Responsibility and Public Relations: Perceptions and Practices in Singapore, Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Chew Wee Ng, Soh Ting Ting, and Luo Wanyin
9. Corporate Social Responsibility in Mexico: An Approximation from the Point of View of Communication, Mariela Perez
PART III: Legal Perspectives
10. Legal Versus Ethical Arguments: Contexts for Corporate Social Responsibility, Matthew W. Seeger and Steven J. Hipfel
11. Corporate Deception and Fraud: The Case for an Ethical Apologia, Keith Michael Hearit
12. Regulation: Government, Business, and the Self in the United States, John Llewellyn
13. Can Corporate Personhood Be Socially Responsible?, Dean Ritz
PART IV: Economic Perspectives
14. How to Read Milton Friedman: Corporate Social Responsibility and Todays Capitalisms, James Arnt Aune
15. Corporate Social Responsibility as Oxymoron: Universalization and Exploitation at Boeing, Dana L. Cloud
16. Towards an Accounting for Sustainability: A New Zealand View, Stewart Lawrence
17. Consumer Activism and Corporate Social Responsibility: How Strong a Connection?, Brenden E. Kendall, Rebecca Gill, and George Cheney
PART V: Social Perspectives
18. Corporate Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Communication, Stanley Deetz
19. Corporate and Institutional Responses to the Challenge of HIV/AIDS: The Case of South Africa, Grant Samkin and Stewart Lawrence
20. Business, Society, and Impacts on Indigenous Peoples, Marcus Breen
21. Activism, Risk, and Communicational Politics: Nike and the Sweatshop Problem, Graham Knight
PART VI: Environmental Perspectives
22. Corporate Environmentalism, Connie Bullis and Fumiko Ie
24. Discourses of Sustainability in Todays Public Sphere, Tarla Rai Peterson and Todd Norton
25. Green Marketing and Advertising, Worawan Yim Ongkrutraksa
26. Sustainable Development Discourse and the Global Economy: Promoting Responsibility, Containing Change, Shiv Ganesh
27. The Behavior of Corporate Species in Ecosystems and Their Roles in Environmental Change, Douglas Crawford-Brown
PART VII: Commentary on Corporate Social Responsibility: The Contributions of Communication and Other Perspectives
28. Is Sustainability Sustainable? Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainable Business, and Management Fashion, Theodore E. Zorn and Eva Collins
29. Corporate Social Responsibility and Public Policymaking, Charles Conrad and JéAnna Abbott
30. The Case of the Subaltern Public: A Postcolonial Investigation of Corporate Social Responsibility's (O)missions, Debashish Munshi and Priya Kurian
31. The Discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility: Postmodern Remarks, Lars Thøger Christensen
32. Corporate Social Responsibility/Corporate Moral Responsibility: Is There a Difference and the Difference It Makes, Patricia H. Werhane