A New Turn for Corporate Social Responsibility
Tiffany Tong
March 5th, 2008
Introduction
The nature of corporations is to maximize the bottom line regardless of social and environmental consequences, because in an extremely competitive global market, failure to do so will result in forced exit from the market. Therefore, traditionally, the enforcement of rules has been viewed as the only way to protect society and the environment; voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been viewed as mere lip service that produces no results. However, in this paper, I will explore a new turn in the development of CSR, with a particular focus on a United Nations initiative named the Global Compact. I will argue that to effectively engage corporations to produce positive results, norm setting initiatives are necessary in addition to rule enforcement. Corporate Social Responsibility will not work unless we have both binding international agreements to enforce punishment of negative actions by corporations and positive incentives for innovation.