A View from the Engine Room: Junior Managers' Attitudes Towards Corporate Social Responsibility

The past decade has witnessed a heated debate in the Western industrial nations about whether or not large companies should accept broader social obligations commensurate with their great power. This debate has been useful in highlighting the social pressures to which large companies are being subjected. It has also served to stimulate interest in the possibility of a wider, stakeholder ethos for guiding management decision‐making. The restricted profit‐making role historically assigned to business has been challenged in favour of a more radical alternative, which acknowledges that companies have responsibilities to all their stakeholders—employees, customers and the community—as well as shareholders. And as the debate has progressed, a whole new range of potential management functions have developed, concerned with monitoring social pressures, measuring company social performance by means of social audits and guiding management decision‐making through codes of conduct.