Issues about Corporate Social Responsibilities

It looks like there are six hot topics on the corporate social responsibilities:
(1) Environment issues. (Generally, the negative externalities)
(2) MNEs (Multinational enterprises) whether they take the advantage of developing countries' flaw in law system to do business unethically.
(3) The development of stakeholder theory (that is, we should care about the public interest rather than making profits)
(4) globalization
(5) the impact of NGOs (non-government organizations) the so-called "public interest" group
(6) anti-corporation campaigns

Corporations and companies now face rigorous scrutiny. Thus companies are forced to adapt to the new situations in order to make future profits.

The costs and risks of corporate social responsibility
Those who advocate CSR disregard the consequent higher costs and fewer profits; they overestimate the number of people who also desire the things they fight for; and the advocates intend to impose their opinion and value upon others.

For companies, one most probable result of adoption of CSR is the higher cost of doing business.---or in other words, the performance of the enterprises will be impaired.‘Stakeholder engagement’ and‘implementing the triple bottom line’ could both prove costly exercises


Further decreases in pollutants may involve extremely high costs but only a
small improvement in air quality. For the environment mania, put them into Amazon forest.


Countries and regions differ widely in their physical and geographical characteristics, in levels of productivity and income perhead, and in the tastes and preferences of their people. Norms,standards and regulations, whether statutory or self-imposed by enterprises, should be allowed to reflect such differences. Insistence on cross-border uniformity may involve heavy costs which
bear chiefly on ordinary people.


Regulations and codes, whether imposed by public authorities or decided on
by big companies or groupings of firms, can reduce economic freedom and deprive people of opportunities.
Example: Minimum wage laws


Such a regime is anti-liberal, because of the ways in which it violates the principle of freedom of contract–the principle that people should be free to enter into non-coercive bargains and arrangements for mutual gain.






Among the freedoms that a market economy provides is freedom on the part of a large enterprise to decide for itself, within the limits set by legislation, what its ‘human resources’ principles and policies should be.

Some people may argue that multinational corporations should show developing countries people how to do the business by treating them well. For these people, the key to the economics progress is simple: big companies become philanthropists.


Companies have no democratic legitimacy ...[while] the NGOs ... have no more democratic legitimacy than we do ...