Synopsis
Most people have believed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) played a significant role in the 2008 global financial crisis. However, little research has been done to reflect on the underlying issues of CSR in connection to the financial crisis. This collection brings together leading scholarly thinking to understand why CSR failed to prevent the global financial crisis, how corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) contributed to the financial crisis, and how we may reframe CSR or improve CSR frameworks to help prevent or mitigate any future financial and economic crises. This volume concentrates on three key themes: A critical review of the role of CSR played in the financial crisis and its underlying theses; A unique understanding of the institutionalization of CSR in codified rules and the application of CSR into business and management; and; An in-depth exploration of the future direction of CSR as post-crisis agenda.
Review
Sharply crafted and refreshingly forthright, this edited collection is easily the most incisive scholarly treatment of the rhetoric and reality of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) produced since the depths of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007-8. It is also the first in what promises to be (under William Sun s expert editorial guidance) a steady flow of high-quality multi-author volumes addressing front-of-mind issues in corporate responsibility, governance and sustainability from a critical yet constructive perspective. If is incontestable that GFC exposed with brutal clarity the depths of corporate irresponsibility and regulatory ineptitude in western market economies, it is also plausible to argue as do the 13 chapter contributions in this book - that the crisis also laid bare the underlying contradictions and limitations of pre-crisis approaches to CSR. In 2008, CSR (as then conceptualised and practised) was tested and found to wanting perhaps even exacerbating the crisis rather than ameliorating it. This fine volume offers intelligent and lateral explains as to why this may have been so, as well as providing informed and thoughtful suggestions as to how CSR discourse and practice might be transformed for the greater good. As the volume s editors assert, the overriding conceptual and policy challenge is to reframe CSR from being an optional extra to an embedded ethical imperative, integral to and inseparable from business discourse and values. Here is a book, then, that is designed both to unsettle and to assure; a book that should surely be mandatory reading for every business executive, every business student, and every business academic. --Dr John Shields, Professor of Human Resource Management and Organisational Studies, The University of Sydney Business School
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