CSR: Management Fashion

Assignment A — CSR

First, can CSR be interpreted as a management fashion? Identify and describe aspects of CSR (in the literature) that support viewing CSR as a fashion (based on the literature on management fashions).
Management fashions are relatively temporary collective beliefs, disseminated by the discourse of management-knowledge entrepreneurs, that a management method is at the vanguard of rational management progress. Business schools, management gurus or consulting firms, often promote fashions, increase its spread and can cause their temporary use by thousands of organizations. Two major arguments support viewing CSR as a management fashion.
First, CSR is extensively promoted by various civil society organizations (CSOs), journalists

According to Carroll, the notion of CSR was recognized first in the 1960’s. In 2008 it was denominated a “global trend” by Halme. Even though there is no clear evidence, most articles on management fashions describe a distinct lifecycle for fashionable management discourse: followed by a relatively long period of latency, a brief, bell-shaped, symmetric popularity curve where the management technique is at the vanguard of rational management progress emerges. As discussed by Ählström, companies avoid investing energy and focus in CSR unless it would boost their business and profitability in the future – reasoned, unemotional, and qualified discourse that characterizes the downswing of a fashion. This supports viewing CSR as a

Describe them. Try also to identify if they are problematic from an instrumental or substantial point of view.
The most problematic issue caused by applying CSR as a universal model is that companies still deem profitability as the far most important factor. Every action or effort that deviates from the path to profitability is hence seen as inefficient, expensive and inessential from an instrumental perspective. In conclusion, a fundamental problem with CSR (or other actions not aimed at generating profits) is that the issues addressed are not measured in monetary gain or loss, which basically are the only measurements most companies are interested in.
Another problem is that companies only consider CSR issues if their legitimacy is threatened. This may be due to the difficulty of measuring the impact of CSR actions, such as raising minimum wages, which is a problem from an substantial point of view – CSR actions are not seen as important enough unless the legitimacy of the company is threatened. Not until legal intervention or, if the pressure for corporate responsibility continues to grow stronger, are changes in core business practice likely to take