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Chapter 21
Operations and
corporate social
responsibility (CSR)
Key questions
➤ What is corporate social
responsibility?
➤ How does the wider view of
corporate social responsibility
influence operations management?
➤ How can operations managers
analyse CSR issues?
Introduction
Operations managers make many decisions, some seemingly trivial,
others more long-term and strategic. They also face many new
challenges as the economic, social, political and technological
environment changes. Many of these decisions and challenges
seem largely economic in nature. What will be the impact on our
costs of adding a new product or service feature? Can we
generate an acceptable return if we invest in new technology?
Other decisions have more of a ‘social’ aspect. How do we make
sure that all our suppliers treat their staff fairly? Are we doing
enough to reduce our carbon footprint? Yet the ‘economic’
decisions also have a ‘social’ aspect to them. Will a new product feature make end-of-life recycling more
difficult? Will the new technology increase pollution? Similarly the ‘social’ decisions must be made in the
context of their economic consequences. Sure, we want suppliers to treat staff well and, OK, we want
to reduce our environmental impact, but we also need to make a profit. And this is the great dilemma
of CSR. How do operations managers try to be, simultaneously, economically viable and socially
responsible? It is a huge and, arguably, unsolvable issue, and in this chapter we can only skim some
of the issues. Yet it is an important (some would say the most important) issue, and no treatment of
operations management should ignore it. Figure 21.1 illustrates the CSR issues covered in this chapter.
Figure 21.1 The five ‘dimensions’ of CSR for operations managers
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