Towards a Robust Model of Corporate Social Responsibility: The Entrepreneur's Firm

Abstract

A brief survey of both the CSR literature (see, for example, Caroll, 1999; Fisher and Lovell, 2003; Freeman and McVea, 2001; Garriga and Mete, 2004; Key, 1999; Moir, 2001; Windsor, 2001; Keim, 1978) and the economics literature (see, for example, Jensen, 2001; Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Witt, 1998; Chrystal and Lipsey, 1997; Foss and Klein, 2004) reveals that many approaches leave practitioners in a paradoxical ethical situation, caught between responsibility to Shareholders and responsibility to society, with no sufficiently robust models of how to decide priorities or specific responsibilities. According to Duane Windsor, there is an emerging 'antiresponsibility' trend in the literature, and a resort to a 'leittnotif of wealth creation' and 'responsibility rhetoric' (Windsor, 2001, p. 226). We suggest that this trend is, at least in part, inevitable because no sufficiently rigorous alternative to the traditional neoclassical view of the firm has yet emerged.While much work has been done to refine and improve the common models of interaction between firms and their social context, there remain several key problems which, we argue, are due fundamentally to the acceptance of the promotion of economic self-interest as the primary goal of the firm, and the widespread understanding of the firm as a profit. creation device. In an attempt to better understand the problem, we suggest a reconceptualisation of the firm, starting from a consideration of the entrepreneur. We propose that such a reconceptualisation may provide a basis for the development of a more plausible alternative.