Why Corporate Social Responsibility?: Why Now? How?

Abstract

There may have been a time when “social responsibility” meant truly caring in both symbolic and material ways for one’s fellow human beings—across the backyard fence, at the community center, in church, or at the bowling ally—but a realistic review of history suggests that those communal ties have been uneven and unstable now, and in fact, we may simply be witnessing what Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton (1985) describe as the “latest phase of that process of separation and individuation that modernity seems to entail” (p. 275). Certainly, America was colonized by those who had “come loose” from the old European structures, and yet the colonists brought with them notions of social obligation and group formation that served to ground communal life in the new land.