IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wai/econwp/07-25.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Business of Social Responsibility: Evidence from the Garment Industry in Northeast Thailand

Author

Abstract

Many business managers demonstrate a reluctance to engage fully with corporate social responsibility (CSR). They often perceive CSR as a cost and their CSR activities tend to be piecemeal and defensive. Such suboptimal outcomes can stem from a failure to appreciate a firm’s social assets. We suggest that firms have the potential to engage much more fully with CSR, in a manner that is consistent with a profit-maximizing approach to business. But managers need help in both gaining an awareness of the social contributions that they can make and in navigating their way through CSR issues. To this end, we outline a program of four-Ds, namely dialogue, data, design and delivery, to assist managers integrate CSR issues into their overall business strategies. Our case study of the garment industry in Thailand illustrates how CSR issues can be leveraged to increase worker productivity and deliver positive social and community health outcomes, despite operating in an area that is often subject to criticism.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven Lim & Michael P. Cameron, 2007. "The Business of Social Responsibility: Evidence from the Garment Industry in Northeast Thailand," Working Papers in Economics 07/25, University of Waikato.
    • Handle: RePEc:wai:econwp:07/25
    Note: Revised 2008-06-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repec.its.waikato.ac.nz/wai/econwp/0725.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    corporate social responsibility; social contracts; rural development; Thailand;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • L31 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship
    • M14 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Corporate Culture; Diversity; Social Responsibility

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wai:econwp:07/25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Geua Boe-Gibson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaknz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.