Business

Many years ago, say 30 years, Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) were not a commonly heard terms, and those who have heard of it simply ignored if not being skeptical over it. The idea of being a good company who takes responsibility of social welfare by spending their money instead of piling it up were obviously a really bad strategy campaign to the shareholders. These days however, every company will find themselves stumble upon social responsibilities one way or another. Such occasion brings to light the questions of whether a company had in it the obligation to answer the call of social demands. Where there are certainly objections and agreements for it, here we will discuss the view of CSR from different perspectives.

Perhaps the first perspective we are going to look at is also the utmost important one, the perspective of profit. In almost every sense of business we are brought back to talk about profit and benefits for any corporate. While many of us would rather frown upon the use of Social Responsibility for profit, in fact there were tons of profits a company can make to pave their way towards glittering money. Birchard (1999) describe the reward of CSR to company as a single word, reputation. Good reputations entice shareholders to invest, customer to buy, the best and brightest job candidates to apply for employment. They help persuade employees to stick around rather than leave and communities to offer tax breaks or infrastructure support. Once established, moreover, a golden reputation cant easily be emulated by upstarts or less civic-minded competitors.

The second factor is law, regulations and social enforcement. The Economist newspaper pointed out that money alone is not the only answer when companies come under attack for their misbehavior. For not being socially-considerate, a company is in the face of risky management. The examples are far too many to explain one by one, but some of the most obvious are food companies facing backlash over growing obesity, oil spill cases causes industry after industry suffered blows to its reputation, and many others. Thus many companies began to take consideration such environment and social complaints and issues as part of risk management strategy. Private enterprise also requires a supporting infrastructure of laws and permissions  more generally the consent of electorates, to pursue its business goals that granted towards the companies and businesses regarded as good citizen (Ikanova, 2008).

Another factor is responsibilities towards the stockholders, contradicts the view of CSR obligation. Milton Friedman (1970) stressed the idea that executives are agent serving the interest of his principal (stockholders). Such justification disappear when corporate executives imposes taxes and spends the proceeds for social purposes. Such executive became public employee or civil servant under the disguise of an employee in private enterprise. He also critically reminds that every money executives spent for those social purposes are the money of the stockholder which they might be unwilling to spent for such occasion. Thus the utmost ultimatum given by the author is that one and only one social responsibility of business  to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Thus from the description above on those perspectives, there are two distinct notions that can be harvested from this paper discussion in conjunction with Iankova (2008) the first notion is a moral (or socially-enforced) obligation to do so It is the right thing to do or It is what the society wants. This in turn led to agreement that corporate should contribute to society goals with its activities. The other notion is based on Bearing social responsibility is good for businesses. Drucker (1984) proposed the principles Doing good is equal to doing well in the spirit of this notion. Business face is changing every single day due to ever-growing technology particularly for those companies struggling in the emerging markets. A solid and reputable identity is one of the most powerful tools to stay on the top of such market. Thus, doing good as mentioned here will had dramatic impact on business here depending how each company cleverly utilize the power of being socially-sensitive.

In the end, CSR should be considered as part of doing business for every company world wide rather than viewing it as obligation. By feeling obligated, corporate while give reasonably high attention towards its responsibility they are separating their business and CSR. The lesson to be learnt from here though, is the importance of CSR can be compared to the importance of marketing or advertising. CSR is now an industry of its own right (Ikanova, 2008), and if none of the company could survive without marketing or advertising nowadays, then so the same case will happen if not now, in the near future. Such way of thinking go in line with the idea presented by Friedman (1970) about the extent of executive responsibility, CSR can be a safe bet of profits for the company. Such profit can be directly for the benefit of the company or indirectly such as good reputation. In field of emerging market moreover, social responsibilities plays even bigger part of any growing company. Such rapid growth and industrialization in emerging markets demands solid CSR from each company to stay in favor of society (thus customers) and avoid the risk of being exposed to social and environmental complaints.