Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly heated topic since the 1980s. But there are severe limitations with the concept of CSR and the effectiveness of CSR practices. Addressing such limitations, this volume proposes that the concept of Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI) offers a better theoretical platform to avoid the vagueness, ambiguity, arbitrariness and mysticism of CSR. It challenges conventional modes of thinking, unveils the CSR mask of business practices and redirects public attention to the core issues of CSR. This collective work sets up an initial theoretical framework for the subject of CSI and examines the fundamental reasons for irresponsibility in and beyond a corporate context. Rooted in theory and practice it seeks to understand how boundaries of CSR and CSI have been constructed in society, and explores some systemic and structural issues of CSI in practice.
Purpose The supposedly radical development of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised questions regarding the moral responsibility of it. In the sphere of business, they are translated into questions about AI and business ethics (BE) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The purpos of this study is to conceptually reformulate these questions from the point of view of two possible aspect-changes, namely, starting from corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and starting not from AIs incapability for responsibility but from its ability to imitate human CSR without performing typical human CSI.
Design/methodology/approach The author draws upon the literature and his previous works on the relationship between AI and human CSI. This comparison aims to remodel the understanding of human CSI and AIs inability to be CSI. The conceptual remodelling is offered by taking a negative view on the relation. If AI can be made not to perform human-like CSI, then AI is at least less CSI than humans. For this task, it is necessary to remodel human and AI CSR, but AI does not have to be CSR. It is sufficient that it can be less CSI than humans to be more CSR.
Findings The previously suggested remodelling of basic concepts in question leads to the conclusion that it is not impossible for AI to act or operate more CSI then humans simply by not making typical human CSIs. Strictly speaking, AI is not CSR because it cannot be responsible as humans can. If it can perform actions with a significantly lesser amount of CSI in comparison to humans, it is certainly less CSI.
Research limitations/implications This paper is only a conceptual remodelling and a suggestion of a research hypothesis. As such, it implies particular morality, ethics and the concepts of CSI and AI.
Practical implications How this remodelling could be done in practice is an issue of future research.
Originality/value The author delivers the paper on comparison between human and AI CSI which is not much discussed in literature.
AbstractCorporate social responsibility (CSR) is a fundamentally normative construction. It speaks to what social responsibility should look like, who it should apply to, and how it should be demonstrated. By contrast, the analytic position of the corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) discourse is evidence‐based, and objects to the notion that companies can claim to be responsible while at the same time act irresponsibly. This paper supports a clear separation between (i) the critique of company performance within the dominant discursive construct of CSR and (ii) CSI as an evidence‐based approach to reading and documenting corporate performance. A conceptually distinct CSI discourse removes the need for researchers to disprove CSR rhetoric before engaging with responsibility problems. Rather than organising studies around CSR claims and commitments, we suggest that researchers of global resource extraction put their energies towards capturing the form and function of 'organised irresponsibility' in locations where mining takes place.
AbstractCorporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and other questionable business incidents that appear to harm stakeholders frequently afflict firms yet draw disparate investor reactions. We address this disparity by investigating the association between firm legal orientation and investor reactions to CSI. We hypothesize the proportion of board members and top management team (TMT) executives with law degrees affects investor perceptions of firm foresight, and in turn, their judgment of blame and consequent punishment. Based on abnormal returns to 629 announcements of CSI and 308 publicly traded S&P 500 firms, we find that both too small and too large a proportion of board of directors and TMT members with law degrees lead investors to mete out harsher punishment. This inverted u‐shaped link is further affected by firm size, firm risk, and industry competition. Our investigation sheds light on the link between executive education and financial performance in the context of CSI and investor perceptions of foresight.
With multiple scandals and a host of disingenuous actions creating ripples across the corporate world, it is high time that Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI) is accorded the due importance, at par with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), by academia and the industry. CSI refers to situations wherein firms fail to meet a "minimum behavioral standard with respect to the corporation's relationship with its stakeholders". There have been many instances wherein CSI and corporate wrongdoings have been covered up with CSR. Many scholars consider CSR and CSI as opposite forces that are interconnected and interdependent, and take turns in giving rise to each other. CSI, being an emergent and a topical subject area, is yet to develop in terms of theory, and is still evolving. The present work attempts to motivate further investigation in the emerging area by presenting theoretical views and available accumulated empirical works. The study has puts across a fair view of the topic. It is expected that the present work will stimulate scholars to take up further investigation in the emerging area.
AbstractWe examine how financial analysts respond to public information about corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) conduct. Exploiting a novel dataset on environmental, social, and governance reputational risk rating based on media coverage and analyzing a sample of 667 public corporations over an 11‐year period, we find that analysts' optimistic bias tends to grow in proportion to media coverage of CSI conduct. To deal with the endogeneity issue, we propose as instrumental variable, namely, the Euclidean distance from the Canadian border. The results are robust to the use of different measures of the independent and dependent variables as well as an alternative instrumental variable approach. We also show that over‐optimistic bias is larger when information asymmetries are stronger. Our findings are in line with the rational over‐optimistic behavior hypothesis and have important implications for market efficiency.
In: Ho, C., Wu, E., & Yu, J. (2024). The price of corporate social irresponsibility in seasoned equity offerings: International evidence. The British Accounting Review, 101369.
