Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr)

CRRC 2008: Call for Papers open! 7-9 September 2008 Queen's University Belfast http://www.crrconference.org

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Models and Theories in Stakeholder Dialogue

By Linda O’Riordan and Jenny Fairbrass

School of Management University of Bradford Emm Lane Bradford BD9 4JL

E-mail: linda.oriordan@freenet.de

Work in progress. Please do not cite.

Paper prepared for the Corporate Responsibility Research Conference, 4-5 September 2006, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

CRRC 2008: Call for Papers open! 7-9 September 2008 Queen's University Belfast http://www.crrconference.org

ABSTRACT The pharmaceutical sector, an industry already facing stiff tests in the form of intensified competition and strategic consolidation, has increasingly become subject to a variety of other pressures. Significantly, in common with other large-scale businesses, pharmaceutical firms are being exhorted to respond positively to the challenge of corporate (social) responsibility (CSR). Clearly, for individual managers within pharmaceutical firms the issue of CSR in the form of closely connected questions relating to patient access to health treatment, patent protection and affordability presents major problems. Part of the burden of addressing the demands of CSR is the need to engage effectively with a range of stakeholders. Individual managers in pharmaceutical companies have to confront the complicated task of choosing which stakeholder dialogue practices to adopt and why. This real-world management predicament runs parallel to an academic interest in CSR stakeholder dialogue theory and models. Accordingly, this paper contributes to primarily to the academic debate by reviewing past attempts to theorise CSR and stakeholder dialogue, identifying gaps and weaknesses, and proposing a diagram-type model as a refined prototype framework. However, ultimately the intention is to offer guidance to business managers. The model proposed here contains those...