Corporate Social Responsibility

All right...we'll give you a minute to get all your snarky remarks out of the way. Go ahead...we'll wait.

Feel better? Good. Now, to the definition.

Corporate social responsibility involves the programs that companies sponsor that aren't strictly profit-generating endeavors. So a company might give money for scholarships. Or fund environmental efforts. Or camps for underprivileged kids. Or PBS documentaries about puffer fish.

Maybe you're a little cynical about the motives of these companies. It's true that a lot of their charitable actions are mere marketing efforts, or an attempt to define a "corporate culture" that impresses customers or the media. In fact, there is a broad ethical set of questions that evolves from the whole notion of "corporate social responsibiliity." Like...do corporations actually have such a thing? What if the corp's CEO is liberal and wants to spend money on abortion rights, and half the shareholders live on the other side of the political spectrum?

And then, what if another half (can there even be such a thing?) aren't even U.S. citizens? Like...we're in a global capital markets marketplace, so a whole lot of shareholders are Russian and Chinese and Arab and Lat Amish (not Ahmish). They don't care about the CEO's view of social responsibility. They just want their dividend raised.

So...yeah. A slippery slope that a lot of companies try to climb. Unclear duties here other than to shareholders who, um...actually own the company.