The Dichotomy of CSR Approaches and Indian CSR

The concept of CSR originated in thie fifties of tfie last century wlien Howard R Bowen wrote a seminal book Ttie Social Responsibilities of a Businessman (Carroll takes him to be the father of CSR (Carroll, 1999)) Since then the notion of CSR has come to dominate the society business interface and many theories and approaches have been proposed, many definitions have also been given in order to understand and explain the concept. Although the concept has normative origins, a lot of literature has attempted to give positive hue to the concept by linking firm's performance with the performance on CSR. Some have gone ahead and suggested that the CSR notion can be strategically used by companies to gain competitive advantage while some continue to take the stance that it is the moral duty of a business to be socially responsible regardless of its impact on the profitability of the company. The CSR literature is dominated by this dichotomy of approaches mentioned hereinafter as altruistic CSR and strategic CSR. The paper takes a critical look at these two approaches and attempts to define the notion of CSR and its two dimensions strategic and altruistic CSR