| dc.description.abstract | The social responsibility of business is to increase profits.’ This was the title
of an article by Nobel laureate, economist, and an evangelical supporter
of free enterprise, Milton Friedman (1970), published in The New York
Times Magazine. Friedman argued that a corporate executive is an employee of
shareholders and his responsibility is to make as much money as possible while
conforming to the basic rules of society embodied both in law and ethical system.
The qualification—embodiment of an ethical system in particular—is good enough
to justify fulfilling corporate social responsibility (CSR) by private sector. In fact, it
cannot be asserted that shareholders are interested only in the single bottom-line of
profit in their books of accounts. Profits are inextricably linked to communities and
environment without which a firm cannot operate effectively. Therefore, CSR efforts
help a firm attain the triple bottom line (TBL) of profit, people, and planet. More
than two centuries prior to Friedman, another free trader and father of modern
economics, Adam Smith (1761), had already echoed the social responsibility aspect
of business in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the Indian subcontinent,
Mahatma Gandhi had introduced the concept of trusteeship and voluntary individual philanthropy, which found support among many industrialists. G. D. Birla,
for example, was always very liberal in donating money to Gandhi if any of his
projects were held back due to want of money (Chakrabarty, 2011) | en_US |
