To what extent do companies benefit Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

To what extent do companies benefit - Essay Examplesuch(prenominal) actions suggest that corporations will increasingly be held accountable for activity of concern to twofold stakeholder groups. As a result there will likely be a renewed interest in identifying the dimensions and consequences of unified amicable responsibilities.Cameron has suggested that binary perspectives of organizational effectiveness exist and that consensus regarding the best, or sufficient, set of indicators of effectiveness is impossible to commence (1986 541). The same arguments can be made regarding companionable process as a specific feel of overall corporate cognitive operation. Social responsibility continues to be a poorly defined as healthy as difficult to measure concept. There appears to be no real agreement as to what constitutes social performance. What is indicated, however, is the need to apply measures which address double criteria of social performance. This study attempts to specif y the underlying dimensions of a multiple measure of corporate social responsibility and investigate the relationship between corporate social performance and multiple measures of financial performance. For the purposes of this study, corporate social performance represents a measure of a firms attentiveness to multiple stakeholder groups. ... This perspective generally cast corporate activity as a zero-sum game. Whatever resources were expended in the interests of social responsibility came at the expense of shareholders (Wartick and Cochran, 1985). The interests of shareholders and other stakeholders were defined implicitly as conflicting and mutually exclusive. some criticisms have been leveled at this perspective and it seems safe to conclude that corporations are no longer viewed, even theoretically, as solely economic institutions (Sharfman, 1992). At a very minimum, there appears to be a consensus that firms serve multiple constituencies and stakeholder groups whose membershi ps are overlapping and whose interests are interdependent (Aram, 1989 Freeman, 1984 Nash, 1990). An understanding of such relationships and an attendant concern for the interests of all stakeholder groups whitethorn force firms to act in a socially responsible way regardless of their motivation (Sen, 1993). let out of these perspectives come varied hypotheses regarding the relationship between social responsibility and corporate economic performance. When corporations are viewed as economic institutions, a negative relationship between social responsibility and profitability is assumed (Ullmann, 1985). The fence hypothesis suggests a positive relationship between social responsibility and performance. Proponents of this perspective argue that socially concerned management is likely to also possess the skills necessary to achieve superior financial performance (Alexander and Buchholz, 1978 Metzger et al., 1993). A final perspective hypothesizes an inverted U-shaped correlation betwe en social and economic performance. To an