Chapter 12: Corporate Purpose, Authentic Stakeholder Engagement, and a Balanced Business Scorecard for Corporate Social Responsibility: A Framework to Enhance Business Education

Recent ethical failures at major companies demonstrate that corporate claims of acting in the interest of the customer or society in general can be mere window dressing (Mea & Sims, 2017). Furthermore, the relentless pursuit of short-term profits divorced from a long-term value perspective can undermine the best interests of a business concern as well as society. While corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs have become the standard way for businesses to express their concern for communities, in many cases these are little more than a disparate collection of well-intended ideas that add little to the real value of the company, the community it claims to serve, or to investors. And so it is time to question the assumptions underlying conventional CSR and look at how it can be made more effective.