MANAGEMENT'S SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ROLE IN THE POST‐INDUSTRIAL ERA

In recent years, considerable interest has been expressed in the evolving role of professional management and the extent to which it should take account of the different interest groups in industrial society. A new theory is now emerging which advocates that the primary task of professional management is to balance or try to harmonise the conflicting interests of the major power blocs in society—the employees, the shareholders, the unions, consumers, the community at large and, in some ill‐defined sense, 'the public interest'. More recently, managers have also become deeply pre‐occupied with the inherent conflict of interests in their relations with foreign states as a result of the growth in foreign subsidiaries. The justification for this new approach is that it no longer makes sense to talk about the 'paramountcy' or the 'primacy' of the shareholder interest in the very large organisations which account for a large proportion of the nation's productive assets. Furthermore this viewpoint has some solid backing from surveys carried out in both Britain and the United States which show that the vast majority of professional managers no longer feel that a corporation's duty is only—or even primarily—to its nominal owners, the shareholders.