Corporate Social Irresponsibility

Corporate social irresponsibility can be defined as a process in which a firm, inadvertently or otherwise, is pursuing a set of its own narrow interests and thereby sacrificing the broader interests of its internal and/or external stakeholders in ways that violate widely held expectations. For this purpose, the term stakeholder refers to any party who is affected directly or indirectly by the decisions and actions of the corporation. Internal stakeholders [Page 209]would include employees, managers, and shareholders. External stakeholders would include customers, suppliers, governments, local communities in which the business operates, and society at large.

The notion of irresponsibility connotes negative moral evaluations, meaning that the corporation’s behavior is deemed inappropriate or improper according to expectations rooted in socially constructed value systems. This entry covers the ...