Managerial Tools for Corporate and Business-Level Social Responsibility

Abstract

We investigate upon the contribution and place of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in firm’s corporate, business and functional strategies. We pursue two aims for the multi-business and/or multinational enterprise. The first is to include CSR as a dimension in defining the business (the strategic business area), as a result we consider what is implied from the mixture of brand and CSR policies for multibrand firms. The second is to illustrate different methods to propagate CSR culture, by means of a classification of the tools to be implemented at corporate and business level to foster CSR compliance. We draw attention to a mechanism that can satisfy the pursuit of an overall harmonization of CSR at corporate level while respecting the subsidiaries’ autonomy. We justify the introduction of this tool by considering CSR as a public good for the firm as a whole. We show that the level of CSR is jointly influenced by the corporate strategy of the firm, by the mechanism adopted to spread out CSR culture, and by the policies pursued by the strategic business units.