What Are The Internal And External Barriers Of Peripheral CSR

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept that almost all firms state that they incorporate and embed into the core of their business activities and strategies. However, it can be argued that often times CSR is not properly embedded into a firm if their CSR strategy does not affect the firm’s strategy, routines and operations. This is known as peripheral CSR (Aguinis and Glavas, 2013). This essay explores what the defining internal and external barriers are to effectively embedding CSR policies into multi-national corporations. CSR is a relatively new concept, which can be said to have gained prominence during the 1950’s after the publication of Howard Bowen’s book the Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (1953). Bowen’s brief definition of CSR stated that it “refers to the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society”. Following in Bowen’s footsteps, many researchers argued over the meaning and definition of what CSR was and how best to effectively embed it into firms to achieve a socially desirable outcome. …show more content…
An internal barrier to correctly embedding CSR into a multi-national corporation may be the false perception that they have already embedded CSR into the firm. Aguinis and Glaves suggest that if CSR strategies are not tied to a firm’s overall strategy, core competencies or routines, it is not embedded CSR, but peripheral CSR. They consider Philanthropic efforts and employee volunteering to generally count as ‘peripheral CSR’. Therefore, some multi-national corporations may be under the perception that CSR is embedded into their firm, however that might not be the case as they may have only implemented peripheral