Integrating Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives with Business Strategy: A Study of Some Indian Companies

Abstract

The turn of the century has witnessed a paradigm shift in business objectives. The economic objective of profit earning, though essential, is insufficient to satisfy the ever-growing and divergent needs of a myriad of stakeholders that modern corporations have to contend with. The corporation, being a legal entity, is viewed as any other citizen in the society, having its rights and duties. Hence, the concepts of corporate citizenship and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have come into vogue. CSR initiatives, to really bear fruit, must result in a mutuality of benefits for the society/stakeholders as well as for the corporation itself. CSR initiatives should be so integrated and internalized by the corporations that they are placed at the very heart of the business and not merely as an appendage to it. Corporations that have understood this mantra of corporate success have internalized the benefits flowing from responsible corporate citizenship and can hope to reap rich dividends in terms of improved corporate reputation, gaining consumers’ trust, employee motivation and retention and favorable market positioning, just to name a few. This paper seeks to study how some Indian companies at the forefront of corporate citizenship have integrated their CSR initiatives with their business strategy, rather than undertaking some unfocused CSR measures simply as a knee-jerk reaction to external societal pressures. Such a study may throw some light on the question as to why an organization contributes to social cause and what it expects to gain in the process.