A sneak peek at the new edition of our CSR textbook

The new second edition of our textbook, Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in a Global Context is due out a little later this year. Above is a first look at the cover, featuring a shot by Lucas Schifres of workers crimping stones on silver in a jewelry factory in Panyu, Guangzhou Province, China.

The photo is part of Schifres' Faces of Made in China series, which was featured on the New York Times "Lens" blog last year. The purpose of the series is to "consider the otherwise anonymous people who produce our essential possessions ...to put a face to labor in China". Whilst most of the photos in the series are simple portraits of Chinese workers, the cover shot shows more of the context in which Chinese-made goods are manufactured.

Schifres didn't only photograph the workers but also interviewed them too. One of the more surprising things he found was, despite concerns from the West about the social responsibility issues evident in many Chinese factories (as exemplified by the Foxconn/Apple controversies of the last few years) they actually found a real sense of pride among workers. As the NYT blog reports Schifres saying, "The answer was always, ‘Oh, we’re very proud; we’re happy that the products go all around the world' ... ‘This is good for China; this is good for our generation.’” “They have absolutely no idea about controversies around the world about the Made in China products,” he said.

This for us captures one of the central questions in CSR - i.e. what exactly is responsible corporate behavior in a global context? Different parts of world have different rules, standards, and expectations concerning social responsibility, but global corporations have to traverse this variety in developing their programmes and need to ensure that their global supply chains meet acceptable standards for working conditions, environmental impacts and other social considerations.

These and many other issues are covered in the book. It's designed for Masters students and advanced undergraduates studying Corporate Social Responsibility courses. The new edition will feature all new cases  (on Vodafone, HSBC and Tata), many new readings, and fully updated editorial content from ourselves and our co-editor Laura Spence. It's also going to have a great new companion website with all sorts of materials for students and instructors. We'll provide more details soon. The book will be out in the summer.

UPDATE
The book is now published. See our post on this and the new free download of Chapter 1

Another free download on corporate social responsibility

Last year we released a free download of our introduction to corporate social responsibility, originally published in our textbook "Corporate social responsibility: readings and cases in a global context". It proved to be pretty popular, with hundreds of downloads in the months since it was released. Today, we are making available another free CSR download, this time from our three volume edited collection on CSR, originally published by Sage in 2007. You can download the chapter by going HERE and selecting the "One Click Download" tab.

The new download is more of an academic-oriented treatment than our last one. It sets out to describe the academic literature on CSR rather than how CSR is thought about by practitioners. So for anyone doing research in the field, or just looking for a general introduction to the academic field of CSR, it will provide a handy starting point. We intended it to be accessible rather than too complex or jargony, so it should make sense to non-academics too.

The book itself is mainly intended for university libraries to purchase. At over 1000 pages and with a price tag of £450, that will probably come as no surprise! But we wanted to give the specially written introduction a wider readership and the publishers Sage have kindly agreed to now make it available free to anyone that wants to read it - and with all the final formatting and page setting in place too.

You may be interested in knowing which articles we ended up collating to capture the field of scholarship of CSR at the time. Things have moved on in the literature since 2007 but we think this still gives a pretty thorough overview of the field. The full table contents are below. If anyone wants full references for any of these pieces, just drop us a line. And keep watching for news of our next addition to the Sage Library in Business and Management - a mammoth 4 volume set on New Directions in Business Ethics, due out next year.

FULL CONTENTS: CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 3 VOLS, EDITED BY ANDREW CRANE AND DIRK MATTEN

Volume I: Theories and Concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility

1. Editors’ introduction

2. Introduction to Corporate Social Responsibility
2.1 What's a business for?, Charles Handy
2.2 The case for corporate social responsibility, Henry Mintzberg

3. Corporate Social Responsibility in Theory
3.1 The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders, Archie B. Carroll
3.2 Corporate Social Responsibility Theories: Mapping the Territory, Elisabet Garriga & Domènec Melé

4. Critiques of Corporate Social Responsibility
4.1 The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, Milton Friedman
4.2 The nature of business, Elaine Sternberg

5. Stakeholder Theory
5.1 The stakeholder theory of the corporation: concepts, evidence, and implications, Thomas Donaldson & Lee E. Preston
5.2 What stakeholder theory is not, Robert Phillips, R. Edward Freeman & Andrew C. Wicks

6. Corporate Citizenship
6.1 Corporate citizenship - towards an extended theoretical conceptualisation, Dirk Matten & Andrew Crane
6.2 Business citizenship: from domestic to global level of analysis, Jeanne M. Logsdon & Donna J. Wood

7. Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics
7.1 Focusing on value: reconciling corporate social responsibility, sustainability and a stakeholder approach in a network world, David Wheeler, Barry Colbert & R. Edward Freeman
7.2 The corporate social policy process: beyond business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and corporate social responsiveness, Edwin M. Epstein

8. Corporate Social Performance
8.1 Corporate social performance revisited, Donna J. Wood
8.2 Corporate social and financial performance: A meta-analysis, Marc Orlitzky, Frank L. Schmidt & Sara L. Rynes

9. History of Corporate Social Responsibility
9.1 Corporate responsibility, Tom Cannon
9.2 Corporate social responsibility - evolution of a definitional construct, Archie B. Carroll


Volume II: Managing and Implementing Corporate Social Responsibility

1. Corporate Social Responsibility, Leadership And Strategy
1.1 Components of CEO Transformational Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility, David A. Waldman, Donald S. Siegel & Mansour Javidan
1.2 How corporate social responsibility pays off, Lee Burke & Jeanne M. Logsdon

2. Organizing Corporate Social Responsibility: Organizational Structure, Culture And Learning
2.1 The Institutional Determinants of Social Responsibility, Marc T. Jones
2.2 The Path to Corporate Responsibility, Simon Zadek

3. Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management
3.1 The development of human rights responsibilities for multinational enterprises, Peter Muchlinski
3.2 Corporate social performance as a competitive advantage in attracting a quality workforce, Daniel W. Greening & Daniel B. Turban

4. Corporate Social Responsibility and Marketing
4.1 The Role of Marketing Actions with a Social Dimension: Appeals to the Institutional Environment, Jay M. Handelman & Stephen J. Arnold
4.2 Doing Better at Doing Good: when, why and how consumers respond to corporate social initiatives, C.B. Bhattacharya & Sankar Sen

5. Corporate Social Responsibility And Accounting
5.1 Thirty years of social accounting, reporting and auditing: what (if anything) have we learnt?, Rob Gray
5.2 Getting to the Bottom of "Triple Bottom Line", Wayne Norman & Chris MacDonald

6. Corporate Social Responsibility In Purchasing And Supply Chain Management
6.1 Supply chain specific? Understanding the patchy success of ethical sourcing initiatives, Sarah Roberts
6.2 Socially responsible organizational buying, Minette E. Drumwright

7. Corporate Social Responsibility And Public Affairs Management
7.1 Differences between public relations and corporate social responsibility: An analysis, Cynthia E. Clark
7.2 How Multinational Corporations Deal with their Socio-political Stakeholders: An Empirical Study in Asia, Europe, and the US, Dirk Holtbrügge & Nicola Berg

8. Stakeholder Management And Partnerships
8.1 Stakeholder management: framework and philosophy, R. Edward Freeman
8.2 Common interest, common good: Creating value through business and social sector partnerships, Shirley Sagawa & Eli Segal

9. Codes Of Conduct
9.1 Standards for corporate conduct in the international arena: challenges and opportunities for multinational corporations, S. Prakash Sethi
9.2 International codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility: Can transnational corporations regulate themselves?, Ans Kolk, Rob van Tulder & Carlijn Welters


Volume III: Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Context

1. Global Governance And The Firm
1.1 Global rules and private actors - towards a new role of the TNC in global governance, Andreas Georg Scherer, Guido Palazzo & Dorothée Baumann
1.2 Governing globalization? The state, law and structural change in corporate governance, John W. Cioffi

2. Institutions Of Global Corporate Social Responsibility
2.1 Reconstituting the public domain - issues, actors, and practices, John Gerard Ruggie
2.2 Strategic Responses to Global Climate Change: Conflicting Pressures on Multinationals in the Oil Industry, David L. Levy & Ans Kolk

3. Global Civil Society And The Corporation
3.1 The idea of global civil society, Mary Kaldor
3.2 Nongovernmental organizations as institutional actors in international business: theory and implications, Jonathan P. Doh & Hildy Teegen

4. Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and North America
4.1 Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and the U.S.: Insights from Businesses Self-presentations, Isabelle Maignan & David A. Ralston
4.2 A conceptual framework for understanding CSR in Europe, Dirk Matten & Jeremy Moon

5. Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia
5.1 Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia: A Seven Country Study of CSR Website Reporting, Wendy Chapple & Jeremy Moon
5.2 Transcending Transformation: Enlightening Endeavours at Tata Steel, S. Elankumaran, Rekha Seal & Anwar Hashmi

6. Corporate Social Responsibility in Africa
6.1 Revisiting Carroll's CSR pyramid: An African perspective, Wayne Visser
6.2 Do firms with unique competencies for rescuing victims of human catastrophes have special obligations? Corporate responsibility and the AIDS catastrophe in Sub-Saharan Africa, Thomas W. Dunfee

7. Corporate Social Responsibility in Latin America
7.1 The Corporate Social Responsibility System in Latin America and the Caribbean, Paul Alexander Haslam
7.2 Social and Environmental Responsibility in Small and Medium Enterprises in Latin America, Antonio Vives

8. Corporate Social Responsibility and International Development
8.1 Serving the world's poor, profitably, C.K. Prahalad & Allen Hammond
8.2 The false developmental promise of Corporate Social Responsibility: evidence from multinational oil companies, Jedrzej George Frynas

9. Fair Trade and Corporate Social Responsibility
9.1 The Fair Trade movement: parameters, issues, and future research, Geoff Moore
9.2 Fair Trade Futures, Alex Nicholls & Charlotte Opal

Photo by johntrainor. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Europeans don’t get to heaven

Both Crane and Matten are in Europe right now. And witnessing one of the most severe disruption of airtravel since 9/11.

The closure of large parts of the European airspace has caused a lot of havoc here. Eurepean cities are full of stranded passengers and there is no train and no bus left to take them home. Even the German Chancellor or her Defense Minister had to put up with a 3 day hitchike from Lisbon and Istanbul, respectively. What a democratizing catastrophe, we are all in it together...

What is instructive about this incident is that this little volcano in small Iceland had such far reaching impacts. This place did not only start the ‘Financial Crisis’ recently, but now puts Europe out of the game. In the first chapter of our book we essentialise globalization as ‘deterritorialisation’ – and we know, its a hell of a term. But this situation makes it evident. Cheap, reliable and easy air travel has made territory irrelevant – where to relax, where to do business or where to celebrate your wedding. It can all happen wherever desired. Unless – the key driver of this globalising movement defaults. Such as airtravel (it might as well be the internet, or cars or trains, you get the picture).

But there is another edge to the case. Lufthansa, British Airways and other airlines as of yesterday have disputed the closing of the airspace. Of course, they are losing a lot of money. The closing of the airspace was based on governmental restrictions. But as it turns out, it was based on rather limited information. Just the simulations of one agency. It all amounts to the assessment of the risk. So BA and Lufthansa ran their own assessments by sending up planes into the sky.

It all points to the ethics of risk assessment. Plane crashes are considered as ‘low risk’ but ‘high impact’ catastrophes. And further, they are risks on which the individual has no influence. If the plane goes down, you have no way to influence the result. So the perceived impact of a potential air crash is much higher than, say, a road accident. This explains why governments all over Europe take these precautions, just to avoid the one air disaster that could happen if planes continued flying. As the German Transport Minister put it, defending his decisions against attacks by Lufthansa, he would never allow "the risk to passengers' life and limb to be offset against loss of revenue."

It will be interesting to see how long this view will be governing the policies of European governments. Not only the airlines loose an estimated €150m/day but supply chains are disrupted and shortages of some foods are already visible. With more palpable consequences the assessment of the necessary precautions will certainly change. After all most governments in Europe which ban flying are very happy to run nuclear power stations or other high risk technologies.

Photo by Pylon757 reproduced under the Creative Commons License.