Anna Lewicka-Strzalecka, CSR as the Ethical Challenge

Anna Lewicka-Strzalecka

The dispute on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the most intense disputes being conducted both in the theory and practice of economic life. In the theory this dispute means an encounter between two kinds of rationality – market rationality and protective rationality, and in consequence leads to the postulate to revise the role and the place of the economic subjects in the social structure. The dynamics of this dispute is being shaped by the changing framework of these types of rationality. Market rationality in the epoch of liberalisation of trade and free flow of capital and information has to go beyond the traditional reasoning and to resist the alterglobalistic argumentation. Protective rationality cannot limit itself to the postulate of assisting needy as its execution proved to be a support for helplessness, wastage, entitlement attitudes and led to the crisis of the welfare state.
The dispute on CSR is being conducted not only between opponents and proponents of this concept but also among various its supporters. The latter ones differ in understanding CSR because it is a polymorphous, ambiguous and vague conception. In practice, so diverse activities of firms are considered to be socially responsible that the sense of CSR is being diluted. Moreover this sense proves to be so strongly conditioned by the legal, institutional and cultural environment that probably there is not one single model of CSR, and various solutions are good in various circumstances. [more]