Stakeholder, Social Contract And Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility, which came into sight of western scholars in the early 20th century, due to its high academic value and practical significance, is now a hotspot in economics, management, sociology and law, etc. In comparison with opponents of corporate social responsibility, supporters can not find solid theoretical foundation and perfect logic as those in mainstream corporate theories. However, movements for corporate social responsibility are going more and more popular, which makes us eager to find what on earth their intrinsic rules are.Based on stakeholder theory and social contract theory, this article builds a brand new analyzing framework for corporate social responsibility. It discusses several basic issues and then disproves those opposing argument towards corporate social responsibility. Utilizing this framework, I study the evolvement of Chinese corporate social responsibility since modern times. I also demonstrate pertinent issues during social transformation period including the relationship between it and economic performance.The whole dissertation is arranged as following:The first part (Chapter 1 & Chapter 2) introduces my cause, thinking and method before summarizing theoretical achievements on corporate social responsibility which provides our theoretical foundation.The second part (Chapter 3) discusses what corporate social responsibility is, including its connotation and scope. In this article, corporate social responsibility is considered as integrated social contract responsibility of corporate toward their stakeholders including shareholders. This kind of integrated responsibility consists of economic responsibility, legal responsibility, ethic responsibility and beneficent responsibility. There are two levels - the autonomous (self-disciplined) and the heteronomous. In practice, stakeholders include shareholders, employees, consumers, community, environment and business partners.The third part (Chapter 4 & Chapter 5) builds an analyzing framework for the nature and motives of corporate social responsibility after investigating the evolvement and motivation mechanism.From the view of social contract theory, corporate comes into being by two social contracts. As an inseparable part of social system, corporate is the carrier of stakeholders' visible and invisible contracts. Corporate social responsibility contract is a fair agreement for stakeholders to conduct consistent actions. Our framework disproves those arguments that corporate social contract model can not be quantitated and struturalized. In fact, it has three levels - super-criterion, multi-factor and practice. Furthermore, its self-discipline is a third power for sustainable development.From the macro view, the connotation, nature and motivation mechanism of corporate social responsibility are influenced by politics, economics, culture, society and history tradition. Vice versa. From the micro view, stakeholders, the nature, necessity, content of corporate social responsibility affect each other. Besides, organization form, system and ownership are the same.The Fourth part (Chapter 6) validates our new framework by investigating the...