Business, Innovation and Responsibility

2Justifications for Corporate Responsibility

Following on from our analysis of the different identifiable levels of corporate responsibility (and their interrelations) in Chapter 1, this chapter will focus on the normative origins of responsibility. How can the ethical dimension of responsibility be legitimized and justified? What are the different arguments and moral theories used in CSR literature? Once again, these theoretical questions have a crucial impact in practice, and responding to them provides the key to an essential challenge for CSR, that of motivating actors to act responsibly (including in the field of innovation) in a context where economic and moral constraints are often seen to be contradictory.

The efforts made in CSR literature to justify the notion of responsibility come up against notable criticisms from Friedman and Jensen, at least in the English-speaking world, and the prevalence of economic approaches to business, as opposed to sociological and ethnographical visions. Given that the liberal theory of property rights only recognizes the rights exercised by owners of the capital needed to implement production, we must consider ways of legitimizing the costs involved in honoring certain demands made by social groups with no right of ownership over the company in question.

In order to respond to these questions, we shall begin by retracing a series of debates encountered in the legal sphere with regard to the notion of corporate social responsibility ...