Enterprise and Society Advance Access published online on April 19, 2008
Enterprise and Society, doi:10.1093/es/khn023
"Business Responsibilities in a Divided World": The Cold War Roots of the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement
BERT SPECTOR is an associate professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their guidance. In addition, the author wishes to thank Laura Peimer and the staff at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library Historical Collection for their assistance in the research. Contact information: College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston, Mass. 02115. Tel: 617-373-2504;
E-mail: b.spector{at}neu.edu.
Both business executives and management scholars have, in recent years, focused a great deal of attention on the theme of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Calls for business leaders to expend resources on behalf of "social good" tend to downplay, if not ignore, what is fundamentally an ideological question: just what is a "good" society and who defines "goodness"? The ideological underpinnings of social responsibility and its relationship to the "good" society can be explored through an historical perspective. The roots of the CSR movement trace back to the early years of the Cold War. Led by Donald K David, Dean of the Harvard Business School and supported by other academics and executives given voice on the pages of the Harvard Business Review, advocates urged expanded business social responsibility as a means of aligning business interests with the defense of free-market capitalism against what was depicted as the clear-and-present danger of Soviet Communism. Today's enthusiastic calls for business to "do well by doing good" could benefit from a similar critical analysis not just of the goals of CSR but also the ideological assumptions, often unacknowledged, that underlie those goals.