RESPONSE - Insead

Recommendations Recommendations for policy and standards
resource allocation and investments, etc.) are made that ought to be adapted to
integrate in an explicit and concrete way the assessment of the impact of those
decisions on the stakeholders of the company and the societal context in general. The
first step in this process of focusing the CSR debate on the challenges of internal
corporate change could be to simply edit the definition of CSR proposed by the EU
Commission as follows:
“CSR is a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in
their strategic decision­making processes, in their business operations and in their
interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis”
4. A New Way to Conduct Research on Business & Society. Moving from the
implications of the results of RESPONSE to those derived from our experience in
managing the research process, we believe that there are some important lessons to
learn about the model of research that might be conducive to best results in this
particular field of social science research. RESPONSE has been characterized by a
stable cooperation between corporations, global stakeholders and scholars through all
the phases of the research, from the formulation of the questions to pursue to the
development of the design and of the research tools, to the recruitment of other
participant companies all the way to the sense­making of the results of the analysis and
the dissemination of the output. The results, despite the increased coordination costs,
seem to be valuable particularly in terms of achieving a real balance between academic
rigor and managerial relevance in the output of the research. We see this as the
possible foundations of a new model to conduct academic research in this area, and
suggest policy­makers and research funding agencies to take this experience into
account as they search for ways to enhance the quality of future research endeavours.
The existence and pursuit of a stable relationship and commitment to cooperation
between research centre(s), business corporations and key stakeholders might be
viewed as a necessary condition, and recognized as such, for the development of
research plans that can aspire to real breakthrough results with both academic as well
as managerial audiences.
5. A New Role for the Partnership between Business and Society. The observations
offered above can be integrated into one final recommendation on how to give content
and purpose to the recent initiative by the EU Commission towards the establishment
of a partnership between business and society (including academia) to enhance the
quality of their mutual understanding, of their multiple interactions and of their
development and growth. Our suggestion is to articulate and focus the concrete
outcomes of the “partnership” on the facilitation of a profound change process inside
both business corporations as well as their societal counterparts. The change process
can be characterised in the following way:
a. Establish the partnership. Even though the results of this study point to the fact
that stakeholder dialogue might not be enough to effectively align managers
and stakeholders’ understanding, for many corporations this might still be the
first order of priority since the standard way to operate is to decide/act first, and
communicate later. This is the logical first step for the establishment of any
partnership.
b. Partner for internal change, first. The enactment of any partnership, however,
cannot rely solely on open and trust­based dialogue. It has to be supported by
joint activities producing concrete output which improves the position of the
“extended enterprise” (including all the “inner ring” stakeholders), thus creating
a self­reinforcing cycle of results, commitment and adaptation (Doz and Hamel,
1998). The content of these activities could be distinguished between
externally focused (aimed at improving global societal issues, in the spirit of a
“world­view”) vs. internally focused (aimed at changing the way business
corporations and their social partners operate and function to integrate broader
social responsibility principles). The core results of the RESPONSE project
suggest that the priority among these two types of change initiatives ought to
be given to internal change processes. In addition to the production of
concrete output, such as for example innovative products with lower or better
environmental or social impact, the advantage of this type of prioritisation
RESPONSE: understanding and responding to societal demands on corporate responsibility
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