Socially Responsible Employee Management: Case Studies from Saudi Arabia and Lebanon

A recent mainstream approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) research is to provide a unique set of ethical principles and standards, such as the Interfaith Declaration on Business Ethics,Global Compact, ISO 26000, which are designed to be applicable worldwide to deal with the eternal issue of cultural differences and with the subsequent problem of ‘incomprehension’ which results (Moran et al., 2007). Yet such global approaches to social responsibility are limited by their own generality. The widely accepted interpretations of CSR are necessarily diluted. In addition, they veil the view of the cultural specificities of CSR strategies and various forms of informal CSR practices. Hence, instead of working on a diluted idea of social responsibility, we propose in this chapter to focus on informal CSR practices in a medium enterprise (ME) within the context of the Middle East. MEs are described as multitasking, cash-limited, locally operating and dependent on internal sources to finance growth (Spence, 1999; Tilley, 2000).The Middle East is a region of particular interest and significance with regard to the understanding of CSR challenges in human resource management (Jamali et al., 2006; Jamali and Abdallah, 2009; Abbas, 2010; Sidani and Jamali, 2010). However, we find very little regarding the contexts of Saudi Arabia and Lebanon in management and organizational literature (Bozionelos, 2009; Al Ariss, 2010).