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The Core Responsibility Of A Corporation

Decent Essays

For many years, researchers held that the core responsibility of a corporation was to provide shareholders with financial returns. Carroll (1979) proposed that organizations have other types of responsibilities towards the society. In Carroll’s view, at some stage society has economic, legal, ethical, and other expectations. The essential part of Carroll’s definition of CSR is that a company has four primary responsibilities: to be profitable, observe the law, be ethical, and conduct discretionary activities. Drawing on those four responsibilities Carroll (1991) created a four-level pyramid of CSR and stated that the CSR policy of a company must include all of them. Carroll placed the economic responsibilities at the base of the pyramid, since for a company to operate successfully, it must have a financial return. On the second level were the legal responsibilities which in order to be fulfilled corporations must pursue their economic objectives (Carroll, 1991). Placing the economic and legal responsibilities at the bottom of the pyramid was reasonable because those two are fundamental for a company to be successful. The ethical responsibilities were placed on the third level of the pyramid suggesting that organizations ought to conduct their businesses operations in a fair and appropriate way and ought to protect the stakeholders’ moral rights (Carroll, 1991). The distinction between the legal and the ethical responsibilities is that in the former the norms are

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