Corporate Power and Social Responsibility: Lessons from the West

Corporate social responsibility is fast becoming a fashionable phrase among businessmen, managers, management academics, economists, politicians, and the public at large. Before these diverse groups plunge into serious debate on this crucial issue, one could perhaps leaner from the long experience of Western countries, especially the U.S., on this subject. A detailed scrutiny of a selected sample of Western thought showed that two different and distinct groups existed. One group looked at the problem as corporate power to be contained, curtailed, or countervailed – the negative view; the other as corporate responsibility to be mobilized, channeled, and sustained through appropriate supportive efforts – the positive view. What the two distinct groups saw depended on the locus of their observation. It was significant to find economists, lawyers, and political thinkers in the former group looking at the corporation mostly from outside, and teachers, researchers, and counselors to the corporate sector in the latter group looking at the corporation from within. The former group, called externalists, has wielded better influence with policymakers in government and the latter, called managerialists, has influenced decision-makers in corporations. The four – externalists, government, managerialists, and corporations – has continued to function as two parallel axes; the externalists-government axis almost always confronting the managerialists-corporations axis. It is concluded that in the Indian context we can obviate such futile confrontations and achieve positive results, and faster, if all the four pooled their thinking. Whether the business will be locking horns or shaking hands with society in the coming decades in India would depend upon the success in such collaborative thinking.