Purpose

To succeed in today’s dynamic and unpredictable business world, businesses are increasingly required to gain the trust of and inform the society in which they operate about the social and environmental consequences of their actions. Corporations’ claims regarding the responsibility and ethicality of their actions, however, have been shown to be contradictory to some degree. We define corporations’ deceitful implementation of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies as pseudo-CSR. We argue that it is the moral characteristics of individuals, i.e. employees, managers and other decision-makers who ignore the CSR policies, which produce pseudo-CSR.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a conceptual paper.

Findings

The authors conceptualize the gap between true CSR and pseudo-CSR on a cognitive individual level as “moral laxity,” resulting from organization-induced lack of effort concerning individual moral development through ethical discourse, ethical sensemaking and subjectification processes. The absence of these processes prohibits individuals in organizations from constructing ethical identities to inhibit pseudo-CSR activities.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR by augmenting corporate-level responsibility with the hitherto mostly neglected, yet significant, role of the individual in bridging this gap.

中文翻译：

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道德松懈——真假企业社会责任的认知差距

目的

为了在当今充满活力和不可预测的商业世界中取得成功，企业越来越需要获得其经营所在社会的信任并告知其行为对社会和环境造成的后果。然而，公司关于其行为的责任和道德的主张已被证明在某种程度上是矛盾的。我们将企业欺骗性地履行其企业社会责任（CSR）政策定义为伪CSR。我们认为，正是个人（即员工、管理者和其他决策者）的道德特征忽视了企业社会责任政策，从而产生了伪企业社会责任。

设计/方法论/途径

这是一篇概念性论文。

发现

作者将真正的企业社会责任和伪企业社会责任之间在认知个人层面上的差距概念化为“道德松懈”，这是由于组织在道德话语、道德意义建构和主体化过程中缺乏对个人道德发展的努力造成的。如果缺乏这些流程，组织中的个人就无法构建道德身份来抑制伪企业社会责任活动。

原创性/价值

本文通过增强企业层面的责任以及个人在弥合这一差距方面迄今为止最被忽视但又重要的作用，为企业社会责任文献做出了贡献。