CSR as a Management Idea - Ethics in Action

摘要

This edited book, which is a translation from Swedish of Jutterstroem and Norberg (2011), sees the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a management idea, explained as "a model for directing the activities of companies and other organizations" (p. 2). The book thereby ties into academic discussions about the diffusion and translation of management ideas, fashion and institutionalization, and organizational responses, issues that have been popular in management and organization studies since the 1990s. The book claims that it is fruitful to think about CSR as a management idea, since CSR shares many traits with other management ideas, such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, Time-Based Management, and Lean Production. A central claim is that what applies for management ideas in general, largely applies for CSR. In other words, rather than seeing CSR as part of a scholarly canon of introducing ethics into business (prevalent in the fields such as business ethics), CSR is seen as a management idea, the meaning of which, similarly to other management ideas, gets produced, interpreted, negotiated, translated, welcomed or rejected. The approach is thus fundamentally descriptive, in that the book is not aimed at critiquing current translations of CSR, nor to provide alternatives to potential bad translations of it.