Having informally observed an ongoing dialogue discussing social responsibility in business, it seems that the social responsibility at some point took a backseat to the prospect and mentality of higher profits at any cost (what's good for GM?). The transition I sense now is a movement toward incorporating social responsibility, which is to say incorporating an ethical code considering extrinsic matters and concerns, fluidly in business models. The revelation that business entities do not operate in a vacuum has led to an incorporation of externalities (e.g. community interests, environmental concerns, etc.) rather than the "bleeding hearts" that are probably most often associated with social responsibility in business. The first portion of this paper seeks to outline the emergence of social responsibility in the context of a continuum of developing business ethoses as well as personal responsibility, which is to say the responsibility of the people within the organization?because despite a cultural recognition of autonomy and separateness in relation to its people, common sense tell us that an organization and its people are inextricable.
Described by Trevor Sargent as "an uneasy combination of two historically separate disciplines" the marriage of ethics and business is recognized by some, including many laissez faire economist types (which is not to suggest that free market endorsement is invariably linked with the mutually exclusive compartmentalization of ethics and business) as an undermining of free society, as Milton Friedman put it (Reasononline).
Nicholas Eberstadt established in his paper that the modern corporate responsibility movement sprung from the Depression. Eberstadt pointed to the Depression as a wak ...