Csr And Business Ethics

The concept of Social responsibility among businessmen, particularly in India, is not new and can be easily seen in the form of magnificent temples, high mosques, large dharamsalas and great educational institutions. Indian literature is full of incidents when businessmen have gone out of the way to help extract kings and societies out of crises. Many Indian businesses are known for staying one step ahead of the government, as far as the welfare of employees and societies is concerned (Agarwal, 2008). Business until the recent past was purely economic. Profit maximization was the watch word. Business responsibility to society vis-à-vis Corporate Social Responsibility were concepts not clearly defined. Since this study will attempt to highlight the relation between a business firms Social Responsibility and its inherent ethical system of governance, a background of business ethics is also called for. We can safely say that business ethics has no chronicled history but a background of the history that has come down through time is given below: Business Ethics seems to have no history. It is one of the stranger aspects of a discipline that routinely invokes the names of long dead-philosophers that its history seems murky, unresolved. There appears to be a consensus that in some way Business ethics simply did not exist before the 1970s (McMahon 2002). Others seem to think that philosophers such as Aristotle spent time expounding on the ethics of business. Cultural theorists may rightly believe that everything is of semiotic value and some moralists see ethical issues in all parts of daily life. Yet to describe business ethics in terms of universal experience is surely to rob the discipline of focus, not to mention to make it sui generis in terms of a broader history of ideas (Bernard Mees, 2005).