2021/03/08 by Sergiy D. Dmytriyev, Sergiy Dmytriyev, R. Edward Freeman +1 · 1 voice · 22 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Environmental Sustainability in Business #Ethics in Business and Education
paper · doi:10.1111/joms.12684
openalex publication_date 2021/03/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract Although stakeholder theory and corporate social responsibility (CSR) have evolved into major theoretical frameworks for exploring social issues in management, there is a limited and often misleading understanding of the relationship between them that inhibits the management field from adopting a social orientation to a full extent. Our aim is to remove unnecessary barriers that preclude collaboration between scholars in the stakeholder theory and CSR camps; empower organizational scholars and practitioners with a more nuanced language for dealing with social issues in management; and enable the creation of a coherent and integrative theoretical foundation in the area of social issues in management that has previously been at a disadvantage to other areas in management. In our conceptual analysis, we argue that stakeholder theory and CSR provide distinct but complementary theoretical frameworks with some overlap. The actual decision to choose a particular framework depends on the problem one wants to solve and the settings of that problem.