Claire Ingram

In its most general sense, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be understood as the recognition that corporations have a responsibility to society that includes but is not limited to their economic performance. There are a large number of definitions for CSR but this entry will be using Carroll’s (2016: p. 2): “Corporate social responsibility encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary (philanthropic) expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time”. Carroll’s framework for CSR has been represented in the form of a pyramid, aptly known as “Carroll’s Pyramid”. The pyramid represents a hierarchy of economic, legal, ethical and discretionary/philanthropic responsibilities; from required (economic and legal) to expected (ethical) to desirable (discretionary/philanthropic). While few would dispute that businesses need to meet economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic expectations of society, debates about what those expectations are and how they should be met are unlikely to be resolved conclusively any time soon— if ever.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is concerned with the responsibilities of business. Stakeholder management is a complementary approach that helps businesses understand which groups they have responsibilities towards and the nature of these responsibilities. This entry commences by defining the term “stakeholder” before discussing stakeholder theory as an approach to business ethics. Here, we consider normative reasoning, such as the concepts of “fairness” and “ethic of care”. We then consider instrumental reasons for engaging with (or managing) stakeholders, presenting— for example— Mitchell et al.’s (1997) “Stakeholder Identification and Salience” framework. We close the entry with a critique of stakeholder theory and proffer some final reflections for stakeholder management.

Business ethics frameworks can be employed to help ascertain how businesses should act in morally ‘correct’ ways (normative ethical theory), as well as whether or why businesses do or do not enact their responsibility(ies) (descriptive ethical theory). In this vein, the concept of business ethics is not restricted to single business entities in and of themselves, but further extends to encapsulate the stakeholders that are involved in, and implicated by, (un)ethical business practice and decision-making. In this entry, we consider the conceptualization and application of business ethics, types of business ethics theory, and opportunities for business ethics going forward. We project a number of scenarios that implicate the future role of business ethics within the business and management literature and other fields, such as CSR and sustainability. Business ethics is well placed to help ground the corresponding surge of new scholarship around fundamental questions about harm, freedom and choice.

This article develops a sociological understanding of consumer resilience across three national contexts during a prolonged, global health crisis – COVID-19. We asked 112 individuals from the UK, China and Malaysia to diarise their consumption during the initial lockdowns of 2020. We found that when social subjects were confronted with material, socio-relational and symbolic restrictions, two types of anxieties emerged – health, safety and wellbeing and social alienation – along with three coping-response strategies, consumer purification, consumer policing and consumer sociality. At this anxiety–coping interface, we identify reflexive, emotive and transformative narratives that are productive of consumer resilience. In this era of ‘Permacrisis’ relating to war, health, climate and cost-of-living, it is essential to examine consumer behaviour under conditions of deep uncertainty to comprehend how (resilient) social subjects use the (non-)market domain to cope with anxieties caused by multifaceted restrictions placed on everyday life.

Prototypes have long been acknowledged as playing a critical role in the emergence and consolidation of new organizational and market categories. However, the precise forms, characteristics, and effects of prototypes in the categorization process remain unclear. We address this gap by conducting a discourse analysis of different stakeholder contributions to the emergence of the new legal category of ‘modern slavery’ in the context of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act, 2015. Drawing on a political agency view of categorization, our findings reveal that contrary to existing research, the role of prototypes in categorization is heterogeneous. Our analysis identifies four different general forms of prototype, namely typifying, mobilizing, familiarizing, and scoping prototypes, each of which are deployed by different actors to achieve specific goals in the emergence and consolidation of the new category.