Abstract

Over the past several decades a gradual process of social change has heightened the expectations which society has for the social involvement of business managers and their corporations. In the forum of public discourse, the discussion of the appropriate social involvement of business managers and their corporations often has centered around one notion: corporate social responsibility. What does it mean for a business to be socially responsible? What does it mean for corporate management to be socially responsible in its managerial decision-making process? The responses to these questions--and others relating to the issue of the social involvement of business and its managers--have been diverse and varied. ;In this dissertation it is suggested that it may not in fact be feasible to develop a singular, unalterable, universal definition of what it means for a corporation to be socially responsible. However, by examining the corporate ethoses out of which various operative definitions of corporate social responsibility have emerged, one can begin to identify the variables which shape managerial perspectives on what it means to be responsible. In the dissertation, analytical attention is focused upon an identification and exposition of three of the predominant models by means of which large corporations in the United States today understand corporate social responsibility. By means of this analysis, we are enabled to identify the normative foundations which inform and sustain the various perspectives on corporate social responsibility. ;In analyzing the three predominant managerial perspectives on corporate social responsibility with their principal normative anchorage in the dictates of the market, the stipulations of the law, and the demands of corporate constituencies, we try to show that while each of these perspectives is significant, none is sufficient as a provider of normative guidance for the advancement of the well-being of the total human community. Each displays a serious formal deficiency: the denial of inviolable "space" within which managers can reflect on the moral dimensions of their decisions. In order to encourage the business community to provide a greater opportunity for moral reflection, we describe an approach to the institutionalization of corporate social responsibility which might serve to help managers make sense out of what it could mean to be socially responsible