The Relevance of the Natural Environment for Corporate Social Responsibility Research

Abstract

This chapter explores the status of issues around B&NE in the emerging field of scholarship commonly referred to as ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR). While both literatures are driven by somewhat intersecting concerns it appears that they have developed mostly independently from each other. The chapter explores the definitional ambiguities of the CSR field and then moves on to explore the significance of B&NE issues in major streams of the CSR literature. While instrumental and economic theory leave the managerial model of the firm largely unchallenged, network and political theories have attempted to re-conceptualize the embeddedness, including responsibilities of business within the wider societal context. The chapter then moves on to arguing that that specific overlap between both literatures can be identified on the instrumental level. The paper concludes with an outlook over key future challenges in the CSR area. It is argued that a convergence of both literatures is most likely, since the phenomena on the agenda for both, CSR and B&NE, inevitably make the dissection of ‘social responsibilities’ and ‘environmental responsibilities increasingly arbitrary

Keywords: Corporate Social Resonsibility, Ecology, Environment, Greening, Stakeholder Theory, Ecofeminism, Industrial Metastandards Corporate Citizenship

JEL Classification: L21, M14, O13, Q00