Central to category (2) questions is the issue of corporate social responsibility or CSR.

This concerns questions about the extent to which companies have responsibilities to society beyond that of profiting shareholders: questions discussed in terms of opposition between a 'stockholder' (US) or 'shareholder' (UK) approach rejecting anything beyond the profit objective as against a 'stakeholder' approach that sees shareholders as just one of several groups such as employees, customers, suppliers, and local communities for whose benefit companies should be run.

Overlapping with questions of social responsibility are three sets of questions relating to accountability. The most discussed are those to do with corporate governance. They concern what sort of regulatory and organisational mechanisms there ought to be for ensuring optimum accountability and performance on the part of those running companies - with the most publicised aspect being what many see as excessive pay levels for top executives because of a lack of appropriate mechanisms.

After that come questions of what is generally (though not always) referred to as 'corporate moral agency'. This is fundamentally about the extent to which moral responsibilities and, with that, notions of blame and punishment can be attached to companies rather than just the people running them: a highly theoretical issue that takes a very concrete moral and legal form in relation to the problem of corporate liability for deaths and injuries and the appropriate form of punishment for those offences.

Last in this trio of accountability-related issues comes the still-developing area what might be called 'accountability and strategy' questions. They are concerned with how those running businesses should and do respond to a range of apparently escalating pressures and inducements for a greater degree of ethicality presently confronting them.

It is a diverse area of study, much overlapping with category (3) and (4) questions. On the confronting side, it relates to matters such as whether it is in the long term financial interests of business to be ethical (the 'ethics pays' contention), the existence of ethical and/or green consumers, the rise of socially responsible investment (SRI), and increasing media and campaigning group attention to what is seen as wrongdoing by businesses. On the response side, it concerns developments such as the establishment of corporate ethics codes, the adoption of policies on community involvement and social responsibility (including a commitment to supporting human rights), attempts to co-operate with rather than oppose campaigning groups, moving from just assessing financial performance to also assessing ethical performance by the inclusion of data on ethical issues in annual reports and the carrying out of 'social and environmental audits', and a growing focus on the ethical in what has come to be called 'risk' and/or 'reputation' management.

(For an indication of the variety of issues encompassed by what are being called 'accountability and strategy' questions, see Kaler, J. 2000. 'Reasons to be ethical: self-interest and ethical business'. Journal of Business Ethics, 27, 161-173.)

Category (1)
Category (2)
Category (3)
Category (4)

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