Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research is the subject of great debate within the management literature. At the heart of the debate is a tension between two opposing views – the neoclassical economies view in which managers must maximize shareholder value, and the stakeholder view in which managers have responsibilities to society (and to other firm stakeholders) that go beyond simply maximizing shareholder wealth. A large empirical literature has arisen aimed at resolving this tension by demonstrating that CSR can maximize shareholder wealth and therefore no tension exists. These efforts may, ironically, compromise the unique contribution of CSR in strategic management scholarship, reducing it to simply another value-enhancing business strategy.
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Mackey, A., Mackey, T.B. (2016). Corporate Social Responsibility. In: Augier, M., Teece, D. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_687-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_687-1
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