Despite there being a case against firms being socially responsible it’s clear that the traditional view of simply making a profit is has changed. Firms have realised that conventional wisdom is outdated and therefore the New Thinking according to Porter (2013) is now seen as the modern day alternative. Awareness of the issues increased drastically in the 1960’s and early 70’s (Murphy, 1978 in Carroll 2010) and this increased pressure on firms to focus on CSR (McWilliams et al, 2000) therefore making firms unable to evade responsibility (Thompson, 2005) by relying on government. This reliance and failure of the government (Crane et al, 2010) to handle the scale of social problems put yet more emphasis on …show more content…
For example, being socially responsible can lead to a good reputation; there’s clear evidence the public support CSR (seen in the growth of the Body Shop). This reputation in turn increases sales, reduces cost and gives the product a USP (Rhee et al, 2006 in Trevino et al, 2010) which helps the firm to improve their economic position whilst also helping socially i.e. Shared Value according to Porter (2013). Additionally, being socially responsible helps recruitment and retainment of employees. Stanford University found that 94% of graduates were willing to pass up on higher pay in order to work for a socially responsible firm. For this reason, it’s clear that firms should ‘jointly address challenges’ (Selsky et al, 2005:850) with the government and NGO’s. This has been seen at Nestle who’ve worked with NGO’s in Latin America to provide 50,000 coffee producers with the required materials (Buchanan et al, 2017) helping improve their reputation …show more content…
Available online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1780075.stm [Accessed: 10/11/2016]
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Crane, A. & Matten, D. (2010) Business Ethics, 3rd Edition. New York, Oxford University Press Inc.
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