Corporate social responsibility in a global context - a new free download

The new edition of our textbook on CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in a Global Context, written with our colleague Laura Spence, hit the shelves a few weeks ago - just in time for the new academic year. And we're pleased to see that it's flying off those shelves pretty fast too. In its first month alone, the book sold almost a 1000 copies, which is pretty good going - and a big uptick on like-for-like sales from last time around.

The second edition is quite a change from the first. It's still based around readings of classic and recent articles on CSR, but we've updated more than half of these, written three brand new cases, and overall it has a much more textbook-like feel to it. Along with Routledge, the publishers. we've worked hard at refreshing the design and contents to make the text much more user friendly, more lively and engaging, and with a great new companion website to help students and instructors make the most of the book. This includes a whole bunch of annotated links to CSR in practice which help readers see where theory in the book turns into practice as well as links to career resources for budding CSR professionals. Of course, there are also all the usual instructor resources like powerpoint slides and teaching notes, as well as a cool new "Case Club" which has suggested cases for each of the chapters in the book. It really is as close to the complete package for a CSR course kit as we could get it.

To mark the launch of the book, we are making available, completely free, a download of the first chapter, "Corporate social responsibility: in a global context", over at the Social Science Research Network. This is the exact same version as you'll find in the book, downloadable as a pdf. You don't need to sign in, register, or anything. Just go to the right page and click "Download This Paper". It's that simple.

The chapter is a good basic CSR 101 for anyone trying to get their head's around the subject. Among other things, it includes discussion on the nature and definition of CSR, and its emergence in different national contexts (including developing and transitional economies) and even different organizational contexts (such as small and large firms, and public, private and nonprofit organizations). As with the previous edition, although we discuss a whole bunch of different definitions of CSR, we don't introduce a new one. Instead we try and capture what is common across CSR definitions in order to determine the main unique features of the phenomenon. We call these the six core characteristics of CSR, which are shown in the Figure below.

Six core characteristics of CSR

Reproduced from Crane, A., Matten, D., and Spence, L.J. (2013), "Corporate social responsibility: in a global context." In Crane, A., Matten, D. and Spence, L.J. (eds), Corporate social responsibility: readings and cases in a global context, Abingdon: Routledge (p. 9).

As we are often heard remarking, CSR is a field of "conceptual anarchy". Hopefully by reading the introduction, and who knows, maybe reading more of the book in class, at the library, or just for your own enjoyment and education, we can hopefully help you navigate through some of the confusion to reach a clearer, if no less complex, understanding of a sometimes elusive idea.

See also: Our top 10 tips for teaching CSR

A cloud of well known words with some rays of sunshine

This morning the Summit opened. It was a well organized and well choreographed session. Our ten year old is a well behaved boy indeed (sorry for masculin-izing the UNGC, I just go by the blue colour of the UN...).

Ban-Ki Moon opened, followed by a number of panellists and it were the usual, well meaning speeches by many leaders in business, and civil society. Moon announced the goal of raising the membership from currently 8,000 to 20,000 by 2020. Bloomberg ventured to step out of his role as Mayor and into that of a concerned citizen by pointing to two of the major challenges for future sustainability: 1bn deaths due to tobacco consumption over the next decade, and a similar level of road fatalities, given the current trends in automotive growth. These were quite daunting, but nevertheless refreshing new angles on the issues.



Maybe i am hanging out too much on conferences that my ears are by now a bit teflonized for much of the sustainability rhetoric. But reflecting back on this opening session, I feel quite good about the UNGC. It has certainly changed the game for many of the companies involved, most of them – which I did not know – are in fact SMEs.



So the ten year old gives us some reason for pride and satisfaction. But you keep wondering if the bigger worry in fact are not those little friends of our laureate who he hangs out with. In other words, the biggest worry still are those companies who haven't even signed up (or the 1,300 which had to be expelled). I think this aspect highlights the magnitude of the underlying issue and in fact one reason why what has been achieved by the GC is undeniably a success.



I liked Philip Jennings, the General Secretary of the gobal federation of trade unions (UNI Global Union). He highlighted the persistent plight of the trade union movement and the apparent tensions between a company publishing all sort of niceties on employees in their CSR report while at the same time busting their unionized workers. Point well made.



The agenda for the future was probably best put by John Ruggie (Harvard University) in the afternoon plenary, posing that the era of 'declaratory CSR is over' and companies now have to 'know and show' concrete progress. He argued that sustainability, as suggested in the new Blueprint for Corporate Sustainability Leadership is not a 'technocratic fix' but rather an active engagement with stakeholders in concrete situations. This new Blueprint is probably becoming a rather influential tool in the future, the Director General of the Norwegian Oil Fund pointed out: they will use it as a guideline in talking to companies and aligning their investment decisions on it. It seems to be a step closer to what many businesses are calling for: a more level playing field.

Keeping it in the Family? Family Firms, Business Ethics and Social Responsibility

In what we hope will be the first of many guest blogs from our extended family of co-authors and colleagues, here's a post from Laura Spence, the co-author of our CSR textbook, about her recent foray into the ethics of (aptly enough) family firms...

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When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to a conference on Business Ethics and Family Business, he looked askance and said “you’ve seen Dallas, that’s all you need to know, isn’t it?” I had been invited to attend the Family Enterprise Research Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada (24-25 April, 2009) because of my involvement in a potential journal special issue on this topic, and rather hoped that there was somewhat more to it than the ruthless pursuit of profit and filial jealousy. Happily this turns out to be the case.

I have long lobbied Crane and Matten - not to mention most of the rest of the business ethics /CSR community - about the need to incorporate small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in our research. Finally, I think, we are getting somewhere in that respect, but family business, to date, has remained firmly under the radar. As with SMEs, if it were just about the numbers this wouldn’t be the case. SMEs generally comprise over 90% of an economy’s private enterprises (and that includes both developed and developing countries). Family firms, I have learned, are just as important, and of course include large Multinational Enterprises as well as small businesses. The study of family firms is far from being just about the little guys - globally familiar names that are family firms include Kikkoman Soy Sauce, SC Johnson, Ford, Lego, Aldi, Levi Strauss, Estee Lauder, Marriott and Wal-Mart. This list of example organisations alone has a wide range of reputations as far as ethics goes, so there is no intuitive indication of the influence of being a family firm on business ethics. However, these large firms are light years from the common small family business in many respects – maybe it isn’t fair to bundle them all together when the institutional arrangements are potentially so different, if only in terms of the proportion of employees who are family members.

This brings us to one of the basic starting points when understanding what we mean by a ‘family firm’; definition of the key characteristics has been an important aspect of the literature since the field took off in earnest in the 1980s (at least that is when the first dedicated journal on the subject was launched; Family Business Review). A review of definitions has been offered by Chua, Chrisman and Sharma (1999. Previous definitions, they argue, revolve around combinations of family ownership and family management, with ownership being seen as the most important aspect to being defined as a family business. The authors propose that: “The family business is a business governed and/or managed with the intention to shape and pursue the vision of the business held by a dominant coalition controlled by members of the same family or a small number of families in a manner that is potentially sustainable across generations of the family or families.” (p.25).

So where does this leave our expectations of the ethics of the family firm? At the conference, the prevailing assumption was that the family firm, because of a presumed long-term perspective, embedded community orientation and shared vision, would be more ethical and socially responsible than the non-family firm. This sounds great but a little idealistic. As things stand, the fact is we simply don’t know whether there is a clear causal relationship since there has been such very, very little relevant research either theoretical or empirical. Hopefully, the proposed special issue on family business, ethics, stakeholders and sustainability in Business Ethics Quarterly will go some way to revealing whether the ethically challenged oil-rich Ewing family from Dallas - or the virtuous lumber mill owning Waltons of Virginia - provide a good model to reflect on in this barely investigated aspect of business ethics and CSR.

Laura J. Spence, Director, Centre for Research into Sustainability, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. www.rhul.ac.uk/management/cris