Carroll's Pyramid Analysis

Corporate executives have struggled with the issue of the firm’s responsibility to its society for the past 50 years, however, many academics and practitioners up to now have questioned what the exactly meaning of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is. There has been a variety of agreed definitions of this concept established by several researchers in many perspectives.

According to Carroll (1991), four kinds of social responsibility constitute total CSR: economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic. Moreover, these four components of CSR might be described as a pyramid, which are clearly explained as follows. The first category is economic responsibility. In general, it is involved in the fact that the main roles of business organizations

Moreover, other three responsiblities are based on the economic reponsibility because the author indicated that without it the others become moot questions. To be more specific, economic responsibility is the foundation of Carroll’s pyramid. The second factor is legal responsibility which is involved in obeying the laws. That means the society expects the business entities not only to operate with the profit motivation but also to comply with the laws as well as regulations of gorvernment. Legal responsibility is regarded as the next layer on the pyramid which is defined as some statements such as “it is important to perform in a manner consistent with expectations of gorvenment and law, to comply with various federal, state, and local regulations, to provide goods and services that at least meet minimal legal requirements, to be a law-abiding corporate citizen and a successful firm is defined as fulfilling its legal requirements”. Ethical responsibility is the third component and also the third layer of the pyramid from the bottom up which

The most important difference between ethical and philanthropic responsibility is that the latter is not expected to be a moral sense; therefore, philanthropy is more voluntary for businesses. Some following statements characterizing philanthropic responsibility are “it is improtant to perform in a manner consistent with the philanthropic and charitable expectations of society, to assist the fine and performing arts, to provide assistance to private and public education institutions, to assist voluntarily projects that enhance a community’s “quality of life”, and managers, employees participate in voluntary and charible activities within their local communities. From the above analysis, Carroll (1991) pointed out three types of moral management (immoral, amoral, moral) and orientation toward customers. To illustrate for immoral management, customers are supposed to be exploited for personal or organizational gain and they are taken advantage of the maximum extent in