– The case of corporations establishing a relationship with young people – because of the moral responsibility involved – allows us to illustrate the complexities of trying to decide what is morally correct to collectively ensure children's well-being. This paper aims to discuss these issues.
– Applying the “stakeholder theory” to child industries – under which term this paper includes all business activities that establish a commercial relationship involving children, either as the recipient or user of the final product or beneficiary of a specific service, or as a co-decision-maker for purchases within his/her family or social circles – reveals a series of conceptual challenges...
– The limited understanding of stakeholder theory within the CSR managerial perspective leads companies to overlook some important moral issues about children's well-being, and exposes them to particularly hard criticisms of their actions and marketing policies.
– If children have been overlooked by the stakeholder theory, how may the interests of youth be represented in a stakeholder perspective?
– To deal with some of the dilemmas entailed by considering children's representatives as legitimate spokespersons, the paper suggests drawing on the ethics of care to attempt delineating a corporate social responsibility towards young people.
– This paper emphasises a number of issues relevant to young consumers, including the absence of children in stakeholder theory and how that absence speaks to the presumed extent and boundaries of corporate social responsibility.
