Defining Corporate Social Responsibility - Tutorsindia

Corporate Social Responsibility
Stakeholders & the social contract
3. Stakeholders & the social contract
“There is no reason to think that shareholders are willing to tolerate an
amount of corporate non-profit activity which appreciably reduces either
dividends or the market performance of the stock.”
Hetherington 1973
“....every large corporation should be thought of as a social enterprise; that
is an entity whose existence and decisions can be justified insofar as they
serve public or social purposes”.
Dahl 1972
3.1 Introduction
Although we considered the social contract in the last chapter we now need to consider it in
relationship to stakeholders and to Stakeholder theory. This theory is one of the major influences
on CSR.
3.2What is a stakeholder?
There are several definitions. The most common ones are:
Those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist
Any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the
organization's objectives
We can see from these definitions that a lot of people can be a stakeholder to an organisation.
The most common groups who we consider to be stakeholders include:
Managers
Employees
Customers
Investors
Shareholders
Suppliers
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