Issues and Priorities in CSR Initiatives: Context and Methodological Discourse
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N. Ravichandran, Faculty of Management, Jamia Hamdard, Hamdard University, New Delhi, India.
To draw the methodological and research issues that exist in CSR arena and generates ideas for moving forwardithCSR initiatives as an inter-disciplinary approach to improve the relevance of CSR in totality. This article adoptedphenomenological approach in addressing strengths and weakness of the CSR initiatives to date with their wide-range of contextual understanding and empirical detail, with reference to eastern societies. This itself reflects a very little work which has been done in the ‘east’; this paper is inductive and explorative one rather. Starting from the changing concept of CSR and imperialism to discourse of CSR effects and characteristics how practitioner in eastern societies and their continued adoption of Western modelling required to be re-visited in the context of methodological content. However, means and routes of CSR are built on ‘west’ initiatives and their perceptions of the tensions and contradictions that seek to oblige the moral guidelines required contextual changes in the researchers’ perspectives. The importance of linking both Eastern and Western contexts of research and practice, and build opportunities for providing more effective linkages between researchers and research users is the need of the hour. The present study provides a starting-point for advance research in the CSR arena with the outlook of changing social responsibility in fulfilling its corporate governance and CSR mission. This calls for redefinitions and reassessment of CSR theories and models while looking at changing the nature of the relationship and responsibilities of the corporate. This article advocates for a strong contextual and research base for changed social responsibility beyond a trade-off between production and reward, and shall be looked into beyond philanthropy. This is a notable and promising side-effect of the phenomenological approach through exploratory research design, at least from a CSR point of view.
Corporate Social Responsibility, Regulation, Corporate Governance, Methodological Issues, Imperialism
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