Better CSR? Return to Neighborliness

What is it about?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often criticized for being overly broad and abstract, if not cynical and deceitful. This leaves many stakeholders frustrated or disengaged, including occasionally the organization’s own staff and shareholders. We see the extraordinary disruptions of the past three years amid the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to reengage with CSR in a more meaningful way. Echoing early conceptualizations by academics and practitioners, we turn to the idea of neighborliness as a guide for this transformation, outlining concrete ways in which this can be operationalized for focused engagements that reflect each company’s embeddedness in distinct communities.

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Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- The academic literature on CSR has long retained a critical element, which highlighted its variously narrow, limited and ideological features. Despite such limitations, scholars also acknowledged that to the extent that CSR could be effective, this is necessarily in relation to different contexts and their distinct realities and demands. Our paper meets that critique by returning to CSR’s intellectual origins, which prominently feature neighborliness, and using this to re-imagine what meaningful, place-centered CSR might look like today. ------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- Building on examples from a range of organizations, both historical and contemporary, we identify three central principles and four re-orientations that organizations can use to center neighborliness in their corporate social responsibility efforts. Recognizing that this necessitates consideration of specific needs and relations, as well as of organizational constraints, we also offer a reflective framework to help leaders decide what neighborly action they can uniquely and most effectively offer in each setting the organization operates in. ---------------------------- Author Perspective ---------------------------- As the first pandemic lockdown happened in early 2020 in the UK, we experienced a surge of neighborly activity in our midst and read about innovative actions by organizations as they reoriented their activities toward helping their communities, which made us want to know more. We also had a long-standing interest in the importance of place and a frustration with detachment by large corporations as if places didn’t matter. Through conversations about what all this meant about meaningful differences organizations could make, we made a connection to the concept of neighborliness, whose fascinating historical link to CSR felt right for this moment.