Corporate Social Responsibility - Part 2 - Looking into the Soul of the Corporation - Entine & Jennings

In Part 1, it was noted that Milton Friedman felt that only people can have responsibility, not corporations (Jennings, 2012, p 91).  Still, in modern media and marketing campaigns, companies go to great lengths to have what business press has coined “Rain-forest chic.”  This has become a popular and profitable branding strategy for many businesses in a wide variety of markets (Jennings, 2012, p. 101). 

Studies support this strategy, finding that there is a popular relationship between social performance and financial performance within a firm (Ubias & Alles, 2012, p. 311).  By integrating financial accountability and viewing social responsible behavior as an opportunity for innovation, they can incorporate this into their strategic management plan (Ubias & Alles, 2012, p. 315).

In Entine and Jennings work, they asked eight questions that are relevant to determining the character of a corporation.  Among them are questions related to compliance with the law, having a sense of propriety, transparency and treatment of employees (Jennings, 2012, p. 104). 

All of these questions, are a good start to assessing the corporate character, but in a climate where compliance with the law is the often not enough, we must look to who is making these corporate decisions.

A study that looked at CEO’s and how their values affected Corporate Responsibility found that personal values did play a role in the decisions that they made in those contexts. 

Despite the fact that executives for public companies are charged with doing what the owners would prefer, still they tended to seek out the course of action that was congruent with their own personal philosophy. This was a direct influence on the decision making process.  There are also the indirect influence of perceptual filtering that occurs when a person perceives and interprets information in a way that conforms to their values (Chin, Hambrick & Trevino, 2013, p. 199).

This implies that a consumer cannot merely rely on the projected image of the firm, but in order to actually assess the corporate social responsibility of a firm, they must look at what is going on behind the scenes of the claims, whether they are actually doing the things that they project and to look at the ethical values and history of the corporation’s leadership.