To what extent do companies benefit Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

To what extent do companies benefit - Essay ExampleSuch actions suggest that corporations pass on increasingly be held accountable for activity of concern to multiple stakeholder groups. As a result there will likely be a renew interest in identifying the dimensions and consequences of corporate kindly responsibilities.Cameron has suggested that multiple perspectives of organizational effectiveness exist and that consensus regarding the best, or sufficient, set of indicators of effectiveness is impossible to obtain (1986 541). The same arguments stub be made regarding social performance as a specific aspect of overall corporate performance. Social province continues to be a bad defined as well as difficult to measure concept. There appears to be no real agreement as to what constitutes social performance. What is indicated, however, is the need to habituate measures which address multiple criteria of social performance. This study attempts to specify the underlying dimensions of a multiple measure of corporate social responsibility and investigate the relationship between corporate social performance and multiple measures of financial performance. For the purposes of this study, corporate social performance represents a measure of a firms attentiveness to multiple stakeholder groups. ... This perspective chiefly cast corporate activity as a zero-sum game. Whatever resources were expended in the interests of social responsibility came at the expense of shareholders (Wartick and Cochran, 1985). The interests of shareholders and other stakeholders were defined implicitly as conflicting and mutually exclusive.Many criticisms have been leveled at this perspective and it seems safe to conclude that corporations are no longer viewed, even theoretically, as solely stinting institutions (Sharfman, 1992). At a very minimum, there appears to be a consensus that firms serve multiple constituencies and stakeholder groups whose memberships are overlapping and whose i nterests are interdependent (Aram, 1989 Freeman, 1984 Nash, 1990). An understanding of such relationships and an henchman concern for the interests of all stakeholder groups may force firms to act in a socially responsible way regardless of their motivation (Sen, 1993).Out of these perspectives come change hypotheses regarding the relationship between social responsibility and corporate economic performance. When corporations are viewed as economic institutions, a negative relationship between social responsibility and profitability is assumed (Ullmann, 1985). The opposing hypothesis suggests a positive relationship between social responsibility and performance. Proponents of this perspective argue that socially concerned commission is likely to also possess the skills necessary to achieve superior financial performance (Alexander and Buchholz, 1978 Metzger et al., 1993). A final perspective hypothesizes an inverted U-shaped correlation between social and economic performance. To an