An Anthropological Approach to understanding the Social in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of Developing Countries

Abstract

In the current corporate scenario, Organisations are facing new community and ecological challenges to their dealing from issues about labor production to community conflict, climate change, or exhausted markets. As an answer to these issues, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement has emerged and established an authority to offer itself as a solution. Over the past decade, as Corporate Social Responsibility has entwined within the network of ethical standards and has become recognized as accepted view within the arena of both development and multinational business. These two domains are the concerns around which the discussion in this paper is restricted. As a result, this study, through the use of anthropology, have begun analysing how social and material “responsibility” is grounded in the normal functioning of organizations. Here the anthropological studies apply ethnographic lens on CSR’s functioning from two stand points; on the one hand, focusing on the CSR machinery and on the other hand, exploring CSR’s local impacts through the anthropological study of corporate social responsibility in a respective geographical area. The aim of this paper is to bring together many of the key issues involved in the functionality domain of CSR while tracking the processes and outcomes of CSR ethnographically in diverse contexts.

Keywords: CSR, Anthropology, Developing Countries, Ethnography of CSR

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