Business Ethics
Corporate Social Responsibility
This guide helps you get your bearings in Corporate Social Responsibility before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.
Before You Dive In
- Corporate Social Responsibility asks how organizations should act when legal compliance is insufficient to resolve moral conflict.
- Rough timeline: shareholder primacy and compliance lenses -> stakeholder and CSR frameworks -> ESG and sustainability governance -> accountability debates around impact measurement and greenwashing.
- Start with the shareholder vs stakeholder argument; many contemporary models are refinements of this divide.
- Use Noosaga to compare frameworks by moral basis: consequences, rights, duties, virtues, or justice.
Key Terms to Know
Stakeholder theoryView that firms have obligations to all materially affected groups, not just shareholders.
Corporate social responsibilityFirm responsibilities extending beyond legal and financial obligations.
ESGEnvironmental, social, and governance criteria used in corporate evaluation and investment decisions.
Fiduciary dutyObligation of managers and directors to act in the best interests of those they represent.
GreenwashingMisleading claims about environmental performance or sustainability impact.
Common Confusions
Assuming ethics starts where law ends; many legal decisions are still ethically underdetermined.
Treating ESG scores as objective moral truth; ratings differ substantially by methodology and scope.
Confusing reputation management with ethical transformation in incentives, governance, and operations.
Recommended Reading
Business Ethics— Manuel G. Velasquez
2018Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach— R. Edward Freeman
1984The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility— Andrew Crane et al. (eds.)
2008How to Use the Interactive View
1
Explore the timeline
Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?
2
Read the articles
Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.
3
Check the concept map
See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.
4
Test yourself
Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.