Book Review: Corporate Social Responsibility in India: Cases and Developments After the Legal Mandate

The term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) usually evokes very strong emotions among various stakeholders of the society and today more so. For instance, many corporate executives and their companies look at CSR with a degree of skepticism—as something that is essentially an extra burden for them to carry and hence, largely seen as a cost; the employees many a times look at it with a modicum of guilt and embarrassment due to what they have become party to as employees in ‘profiteering’ companies that routinely cut corners of all kinds; the consumers frequently feel that the corporations are either their adversaries or do not have their welfare in mind, as they frequently feel shortchanged due to the misrepresentation and miscommunication from corporations in their daily transactions. Institutions and corporations in the business-to-business world often look at their relationship with their upstream and downstream partners as a zero-sum proposition that they must exploit forcing the vendors to circumvent conventions of good business (say, by reducing safety norms; or material quality etc.) in the name of ‘cutting’ costs; and finally the regulators, who time and again sees the corporation as merely a recalcitrant and mercenary partner in the developmental and governance goals envisaged by the government of the day.