Corporate social responsibility towards human development: A capabilities framework

Abstract

The starting point of this paper is the need to promote a people‐centred corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework in a context where many human needs and rights remain unsatisfied and where businesses may have both a positive and a negative impact on the quality of life of human beings today and tomorrow and may even lead to irreversible damage. Our normative definition of CSR is consistent with the criteria established by the EU Commission in 2011. We conceive CSR as a responsibility towards human development in two complementary ways: (a) a holistic responsibility shared by companies together with other actors to safeguard humanity and (b) a direct liability of each company for its impact on stakeholders' capabilities. We apply Nussbaum's list of central capabilities and concept of thresholds to specify the nature and extent of corporate responsibilities towards employees, subcontractors, investors, customers, and humanity as a whole. In addition, we leverage fieldwork in developing and developed countries to analyse the effect of business activities on human capabilities. We demonstrate that by quantifying the impact of businesses' activities on various dimensions of stakeholders' lives, and especially on the most vulnerable ones, these businesses can be held accountable for the negative externalities they produce.

Does context matter for sustainability disclosure? Institutional factors in Southeast Asia

“…Furthermore, governmental tax incentives and tax exemptions (Lu, 2013), across many of these countries also aim to engender a more proactive stance towards corporate community involvement by companies (See Table 1), potentially, as a more sustainable solution to poverty alleviation (Nugroho, Tanaya, Widiyanti, & Permana, 2010;Rahman et al, 2011). The disclosure of HR practices, could be attributed to the extensive labour policies prevalent across all six countries together with the other "soft" laws such as the United Nation Global Compact and the OECD principles (Renouard & Ezvan, 2018). Companies in the region therefore, seem to be focused on engaging in creating shared value through their HR practices (Battaglia, Bianchi, Frey, & Passetti, 2015;Holder-Webb, Cohen, Nath, & Wood, 2009;Kuasirikun & Sherer, 2004).…”

Educating for self‐interest or ‐transcendence? An empirical approach to investigating the role of moral competencies in opportunity recognition for sustainable development

“…More recently, scholars have tried to integrate (moral) competencies into context‐specific business domains that deal with sustainable development, for instance in the field of corporate social responsibility (Osagie et al, ; Renouard & Ezvan, ; Wesselink, Blok, Leur, Lans, & Dentoni, ) and the field of sustainable entrepreneurship (Lans et al, ; Ploum et al, ). Within these fields, two distinct moral competencies are highlighted: normative competence and (strategic) action competence.…”

CEO letters: Social license to operate and community involvement in the mining industry

“…Finally, as different authors have indicated (Griffin, ; Renouard & Ezvan, ), the analysis of how companies become involved in communities to improve human development should be promoted. These works indicate that studies about the community have become increasingly important in recent years, in line with the United Nations goals for Sustainable Development.…”

“…Finally, as different authors have indicated (Griffin, 2017;Renouard & Ezvan, 2018) The tables with regression analysis and the data used in this paper can be obtained in the following Zenodo community (https://zenodo.org/ communities/ccis/about/).…”