Fluent Essays

Please read this two readings and using in the essay.1750-2000 words (approximately), not including bibliography.3 link about this topic:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGVhezdaeYYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=SxWWoGO1Y4A&feature=emb_logohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwr1gt8qsfA&feature=youtu.be first_essay_assignment.pdf reich.pdf birch_ch5.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview First Term Paper Foundations of Business and Society Length: Format: 1750-2000 words (approximately), not including bibliography. Typed, numbered pages, title page, APA style citations and references. General Essay Instructions Please write an essay on one of the following topics. You will be marked on your ability to write and think clearly and systematically about the question. You will also be expected to demonstrate your skill in using and assessing the relevant course readings. Excessive quotation from readings is strongly discouraged. APA style reference lists and parenthetical citations are required. TOPIC: Some people like Milton Friedman (1970) have argued that the social responsibility of business is to make a profit, and that the job of management should not include the pursuit of the public good or social and ethical values. Others argue that the goal of running a successful business can involve and be consistent with “doing good.” Using the readings by Birch and Reich address the issues of corporate social responsibility as reflected in the apparent conflict between the two perspectives mentioned above. 5 | Corporate responsibility Copyright 2017. Zed Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Introduction In 2015 the car-maker Volkswagen (VW) admitted it had been bypassing US air pollution regulations by installing software that tricked regulators during official testing but otherwise did nothing to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. It is rare that a business is caught so obviously in the act of cheating regulations designed to achieve some form of social and/or ecological objective, like the reduction of emissions, but that was clearly the case here. As such, it represents another example of corporate malfeasance to sit alongside a growing list of issues we highlight in this book and other authors highlight elsewhere (Bakan 2004). However, we want to emphasize that the VW case does not represent an example of deviant organizational wrongdoing; as Baxter (2015) notes, many other car-makers also seek to ‘game’ the regulatory system. Rather, it raises a major issue facing students of business today: what are the non- economic responsibilities of business to society and the environment? A number of business scholars argue that integrating the idea of social and environmental responsibilities into corporate or business activities is vital for the survival and performance of the corporation or business, since businesses are dependent on their ‘social licence’ to operate (Gunningham et al. 2006). In the VW case, for example, the actions of executives and other employees at VW have had a major impact on the value of VW shares, largely due to the expectation that the company’s actions will result in significant regulatory fines (Nieuwenhuis 2015). Consequently, the then CEO of VW, Martin Winterkorn, resigned. Scholars in management and business studies stress the need to take corporate social responsibility (CSR) seriously since it reflects an ‘enlightened self-interest’, in that businesses should act responsibly because it will benefit their bottom line, i.e. profit (see Carroll and Buchholtz 2015: 40). This notion is evident in the VW case where its actions led to damaging impacts on their share price, consumer and investor confidence, regulatory oversight and so on. Although the fallout from the VW case is likely to lead to a range of regulatory changes, we would argue that it is actually unlikely to change the actions of corporations and businesses. Calls for corporate responsibility are not new, stretching back well over a century. The growth of CSR as a subject of study in business schools and elsewhere, the expansion of CSR activities by businesses, the development of global initiatives to promote CSR (e.g. the UN’s Social Compact), and much else besides, has not stopped businesses from making socially- and environmentally-damaging decisions. As such, CSR has not necessarily made business practices more socially or environmentally responsible. For example, VW boasts of their ‘tradition of global CSR engagement’ on their website under the heading ‘Sustainability and Responsibility’,1 none of which stopped the company from pursuing profit at the expense of the environmental consequences (see Chapter 8). Key concept: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) As a concept, CSR is not easy to pin down, largely because so many people have different perspectives on what it means and debates about its meaning have shifted and changed over the years, but also because it is often used to refer to quite different things. A broad definition might concern the social responsibility of business to consider their impacts on society, both negative (i.e. harm) and positive (i.e. good). However, a more distinct definition of CSR refers explicitly to the activities of public corporations, owned by shareholders. In this case, CSR refers more to the need for corporations to consider their impacts on society in relation to their fiduciary obligation to their shareholders (e.g. pursuit of profit). In both cases, though, the responsibility of businesses and corporations can be defined as the requirement to meet their economic or fiduciary obligations, alongside the requirement to obey the laws of the society in which they operate. Source: Carroll and Buchholtz (2015) In this book, we want to problematize mainstream perspectives of CSR that are based on the notion profit and responsibility are compatible with one another, even virtuously self-reinforcing. Instead, we want to unpack the problems with CSR specifically and notions of corporate responsibility more generally. In particular, we argue that the integration of CSR – in its many forms – into management training and managerial practices does not provide an adequate means to address the damaging impacts that business can have on society, on the environment and on our lives. We start with a discussion of mainstream perspectives on CSR, its intellectual history and how it is manifested in society today. We then critique this perspective from a number of standpoints, before finishing with a discussion of forms of economic organization that provide better ways to integrate social concerns into business activity. Mainstream perspectives on corporate responsibility Changing attitudes to business Before asking what social responsibilities businesses have or should have, it is pertinent to wonder EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/2/2020 10:39 PM via YORK UNIV LIBRARIES AN: 1442387 ; Birch, Kean, Peacock, Mark, Wellen, Richard, Hossein, Caroline, Scott, Sonya, Salazar, Alberto.; Business and Society : A Critical Introduction Account: s2867684.main.ehost 47 Copyright 2017. Zed Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. why this is an issue at all. As noted in the Introduction to this book, the relationship between business and society has often been fraught (Sexty 2008). In many countries, public attitudes towards and opinions of business have changed quite dramatically over the decades stretching back at least to the 1800s – see Table 5.1 for the USA. Moreover, these attitudes have often swung from positive to negative in a short space of time, as evident in the public reactions to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. In our view, it is worth highlighting these changes in attitude in order to understand better the rise and embedding of CSR in business practices and decision-making, which we come back to below. Key discussion questions • • • • • • How have attitudes to business changed over time? How have attitudes to the social responsibility of business changed over time? What are the dominant schools of thought on ‘corporate social responsibility’? Are there any problems with these dominant schools of thought? How could the question of corporate responsibility be rethought? What are good examples of contemporary corporate responsibility? As Table 5.1 illustrates, public attitudes to business often reflect broader socio-economic circumstances. Primarily, negative attitudes to business are associated with recessions, depressions and crises, while positive attitudes are associated with booms, growth and employment. At the end of the 1800s, for example, there was significant unrest in many countries as a result of the Long Depression starting in 1873 and in the USA in particular because of the increasing concentration of corporate power in the hands of a few so-called Robber Barons, which included people like John D. Rockefeller who owned Standard Oil (Trachtenberg 2007). The political theorist Scott Bowman (1996) notes the growing criticism of business corporations by scholars and thinkers of the time, including people like Thorstein Veblen (1899), and the rise of popular social movements against corporate power as well. TABLE 5.1 Changing attitudes to business through US history Time period Attitude Characteristics Late 1800s and early 1900s 1920s 1930s 1950s and 1960s 1970s 1980s Early 1990s Late 1990s Early 2000s Mid 2000s Negative ‘Robber barons’ – concentration of businesses in trusts and monopolies Positive Negative Positive Negative Positive Negative Positive Negative Positive Late 2000s to present Negative ‘Roaring twenties’ – stock market boom Great Depression following Wall Street Crash ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ – full employment, rising wages and mass consumerism Stagflation – rising unemployment and inflation Government roll-back of regulations and rising stock markets Recession and business failures Dot.com boom and rising stock markets Dot.com crash in 2000 followed by major corporate scandals (e.g. Enron) Growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility, ‘green’ business as well as rising house prices Global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and anger at banks Source: adapted from Sexty (2008) As a result of these social critiques and movements, the US government introduced laws like the 1890 Sherman Anti-trust Act to stop the formation of business monopolies and the pursuit of anti-competitive practices (Christophers 2016). As we discuss in greater detail in our discussion of business regulation in Chapter 13, the intention behind such laws, also enacted in other countries, was to break up the power of private business organizations so that they could not control markets and exploit consumers. Despite negative attitudes to business during this period, however, it is notable that public attitudes to business shifted quite dramatically in the early 1900s, becoming more positive. For example, during the Roaring Twenties more and more people in the USA invested in corporate shares and benefited from rising share prices, at least up until 29 October 1929 when the Wall Street Crash brought it all tumbling down again (Galbraith 2009 [1955]). More recent public attitudes towards banks and other financial businesses before and after the 2007–2008 global financial crisis reflect a similar situation ( Birch 2015; van Staveren 2015). Intellectual history of corporate social responsibility While we could write more on the history of public attitudes towards business, that is not our aim in this chapter. Rather, the brief outline above is meant to help us better understand the evolution of EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/2/2020 10:39 PM via YORK UNIV LIBRARIES AN: 1442387 ; Birch, Kean, Peacock, Mark, Wellen, Richard, Hossein, Caroline, Scott, Sonya, Salazar, Alberto.; Business and Society : A Critical Introduction Account: s2867684.main.ehost 48 Copyright 2017. Zed Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a concept and set of practices. According to Kemper and Martin (2010) and Barkan (2013), debates on the social responsibility of business first emerged in the 1930s at the time when the role of the corporation and corporate management was being hotly debated by American thinkers like Berle and Means (1932) – see Chapters 3 and 4 – during the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash. In the specific US context, corporate responsibility was associated with the growing influence of corporate managers and executives in society, especially as this related to managerial decision-making (Carroll 1999). Such managerial decisions could have major impacts on communities, especially when it came to the negative or positive impacts resulting from the building of new factories and facilities (e.g. unemployment versus employment). This influence of managers and executives on society has been defined as managerial capitalism or simply managerialism by some scholars (Whitley 1999; Locke and Spender 2011), and denotes the role of managers and executives in socio-economic change in contrast to other forms of economic coordination and organization (e.g. the state, the market). In light of the influence of managerialism, the social responsibility of managers became an increasingly important issue in academic debates on the relationship between business and society. Archie Carroll (1999) provides a helpful overview of the evolution of these debates since the mid-twentieth century. For example, he splits the evolution of CSR into five time periods as follows: • • • • • modern era begins in 1950s CSR formalized in 1960s definitions of CSR multiply in 1970s splintering of CSR concepts in 1980s alternative ideas developed in 1990s. According to Carroll (1999), when it first emerged in the 1950s CSR was generally conceptualized in terms of the social responsibility of business managers, stressing the power they had over the rest of society. As scholars sought to define CSR more clearly in the 1960s, they argued that socially responsible business practices led to long-term benefits for businesses and that managers need to keep in mind the impact their businesses have on society. These ideas came under serious challenge in 1970 with the publication of a now famous article by Milton Friedman (1970) in the New York Times Magazine. This article, titled ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’, was a direct attack on managerial notions of the social responsibility of business from the perspective of the Chicago School of Economics – sometimes defined as ‘neoliberalism’ – in which shareholder interests are presented as predominant. Some, like Kemper and Martin (2010), have even argued that academic debates on CSR since then have ended up as one response after another to this argument by Friedman. Milton Friedman was a professor at the Chicago School of Economics, which was famous for its strongly pro-market position in academic and policy debates. Often characterized as a ‘neoliberal’ school of thought, the Chicago School of Economics has played and continues to play a major role in the direction of government, law and business (Birch 2015). In the 1970 article and his previous work, Friedman argued that the market provides the best way to coordinate economic activity, which contrasted with dominant perspectives at the time associated with managerialism and Keynesianism. In his News York Times Magazine article, Friedman (1970) basically argued that business only has one responsibility, namely the pursuit of profit for shareholders. While Friedman conflated business with public corporations in his argument, which is a point we return to below, his key claim was that shareholders are the owners of corporations and therefore the ones who should make decisions about where to spend their money. Managers, on the other hand, who assert the right to determine the social responsibility of the corporation are coercing shareholders (by taking their profits) and customers (by charging them higher prices) into undertaking actions they might not want if they had a choice. In fact, Friedman argued that the only time a business could pursue social responsibility was when these activities had instrumental and beneficial impact on the business itself (e.g. as a marketing ploy to endear it to customers and increase profits). Other than in such cases, it is both inaccurate and dangerous to conflate business pursuits and attempts to improve society. In the 1970s and 1980s, and after Friedman, debates on CSR proliferated, leading to new concepts and ideas like corporate social responsiveness, corporate social performance, social contract theory, stakeholder theory etc. (Carroll 1999; Kemper and Martin 2010). During this period, several important concepts were developed by a number of scholars that are still influential today, and which we discuss below. Finally, in the 1990s and 2000s a range of new ideas around social responsibility emerged building on ideas of sustainability, sustainable development and sustainable business – see Chapter 9 for more on the roots of these ideas. This brief history cannot do more than hint at the diversity of ideas in debates about CSR, so we turn to some of the key theories next. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/2/2020 10:39 PM via YORK UNIV LIBRARIES AN: 1442387 ; Birch, Kean, Peacock, Mark, Wellen, Richard, Hossein, Caroline, Scott, Sonya, Salazar, Alberto.; Business and Society : A Critical Introduction Account: s2867684.main.ehost 49 Copyright 2017. Zed Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Some have observed that the degree and type of emphasis on CSR varies significantly between countries (Matten and Moon 2008 ). In countries with a relatively weak welfare state, where social goods like health care and economic security are not provided or guaranteed by the state, one can see more ‘explicit’ forms of CSR. For example, large US businesses like Exxon or Walmart make efforts to demonstrate their commitment to voluntary actions to curb pollution or monitor their overseas operations. In these liberal-market economies, CSR is called ‘explicit’ because it acts as a substitute for more institutionalized public provision of social benefits. In such contexts, explicit CSR allows corporations to be less threatening to social cohesion (Kang and Moon 2012). By contrast, CSR tends to be ‘implicit’ in other countries where the aims of social cohesion are achieved through state regulatory frameworks or strong normative constraints embedded within the business system and often internalized by its participants. One example of implicit CSR is the ‘relational’ system of corporate governance in Germany where workers’ interests gain attention not by separate voluntary actions, but by ensuring employee representation into corporate governance bodies (see Chapter 4). Major theories of corporate social responsibility While the history of CSR implies that there has been a proliferation of concepts and ideas about what constitutes corporate responsibility, it is possible to identify a few core theories from which modern CSR theories and practices emerged. Aside from Friedman’s pro-market perspective (i.e. that business should only pursue profit), Kemper and Martin (2010) argue that current CSR debates centre on the following theoretical traditions: (1) the three-dimensional model, (2) the social contract model and (3) the stakeholder model. First, the three-dimensional model, which has since been updated to four-dimensions, originates with the work of Archie Carroll ... Purchase answer to see full attachment