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BUSINESS RESPONSIBILITY.
AN AMERICAN CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE
Heidi Hadsell, USAOne widely shared approach in North America to business ethics
in recent decades has often envisioned some combination of a three-
fold responsibility that corporations have in society : the responsibil-
ity to the shareholders, to the consumer, and to the wider society. It
is generally assumed for those who use this rough notion of corporate
responsibility, that when big business manages to balance its respon-
sibility to these three stakeholders and thus to negotiate their separate
and often competing interests, business is acting in an ethically
responsible way.
According to this common logic, when a given business engaging
in economic activity of some kind, thinks not only of the profits that
go to the owners or shareholders of the business, but also about the
consumer, and therefore about things like the reliability of the object
or service being provided, about honesty in advertising, about quality
and durability, and when a business thinks not only of profits and
customers or consumers, but also about the wider society, and thus
about the role of the business in the community, and more largely
about the use of the resources of the community, and the people in the
community not directly connected to the business – then business
may be said to be acting in a responsible manner.
- Primary Responsibility : Profits
On the whole, I think that this recognition of the various ‘stake-
holders’, and the need to create some kind of balance among them, is
a formula that in a capitalist economy can be used to promote and to
assess business responsibility. But there are of course problems with
this formula. Who is to define the interests of each of these stake-
holders for example? More importantly, what about the many times
when the interests of the stakeholders collide? What of the many
actual or potential moments for example, in which business respon-
sibility to the stockholder which is centrally to maximise profit, com-
petes with the often very nebulous (and difficult to define) responsi-
bility to the consumer or to the wider society?