Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 95 - July 2020): CSR

Publisher : Routledge

Corporate Social Irresponsibility focuses on ethical failures in order to relate corporate responsibility to business ethics, corporate governance, and organization effectiveness. The book advocates a strategic approach to CSR - ethical management cannot, and should not, be divorced from effective management. Corporate social responsibility has transitioned from oxymoron into a defining challenge of the twenty first century. Taking the recent financial crisis as a starting point, Alexander examines the underlying ethical and legal crises these events expose in the business world. The problems that have come to light go beyond issues of firm financial performance into the integrity of the manufacturing and marketing processes, and relations with consumers. As such, the book presents a model that resolves the apparent conflict between maximizing shareholder value, and meeting the interests of other firm stakeholders. Alexander presents a balanced view, contrasting her model with alternative approaches. The book also covers the impact of globalization on management, the ethics of outsourcing, the limits of regulation, as well as poverty alleviation and social entrepreneurship. Blending a comprehensive theoretical framework with a broad range of cases, this book covers the latest major changes in US legislation, as well as recent corporate scandals making it a valuable accompaniment to any course in CSR, business ethics, or business, government and society.

eBook Price : £56.69

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Corporate social responsibility has been defined as 'the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society'. Is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) just window dressing or is it a contradiction in terms? In this Very Short Introduction, Jeremy Moon shows that CSR holds much morevalue than it first appears, and shows how it has come of age in recent years. Illustrating the sorts of CSR investments companies make, the ways in which they practice CSR, and the challenges this brings, Moon considers how the principles migrated from their US roots to become a global businessphenomenon.Exploring the place of CSR in different economic, social, political, and managerial contexts, this short guide considers the many positives, but also challenges, that CSR can present for companies, societies, and governments worldwide.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Print Price: $11.95

Publisher : Samfundslitteratur

Our world faces an ecological crisis of its own creation. The many facets of this crisis include human induced climate change, reduction in biodiversity in a broad range of ecosystems, increasing rate of species extinctions, and the impacts on social systems that span equity of access to food and water, human rights, and the well-being of individuals and societies. This ecological crisis is widely acknowledged and there have been many attempts at organisational and societal levels to redress its negative impacts, yet despite the widespread effort there seems to be little progress being made. The research for this book investigates organisational enactment of sustainability. The findings highlight barriers concerned with meaning construction that view nature as an excluded other. The proposition of this book is that successful adoption of sustainability, at all scales, needs new narratives to facilitate the emergence of meanings of sustainability conducive to the inclusion of nature and argues for the need to create a new social imaginary(ies) to support ecological sustainability. A contribution of this book is to provide the frame of metabolic organisation, a different conceptual foundation to the three dimensions of sustainable development - economic, environmental and social - to stimulate the creation of new ecological imaginaries. Metabolic organisation is defined as a multi-scalar systemic framework comprising three interdependent concepts: metabolism, values and enmeshment, and brings together three distinct strands of theory: social and biological metabolism, value theory and ecological theories. (Series: Advances in Organization Studies, Vol. 31)Ã?Ã?[Subject: Sustainability, Management and Organizational Studies, Human Geography, Sociology, Ecology, Cultural Studies]

Price: $45.00
Format : eBook Available

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote "I think" and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin's tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation - adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning. In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament during the evolution of every species is that, according to habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive. The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way trade-off is the irreducible core of the universal adaptive strategy theory which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book reflects an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common theoretical framework. Visit www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies to access the artwork from the book.

Price: $149.95
Format : eBook Available

Publisher : Routledge

The corporate and the social are crucial themes of our times. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, both individual lives and society were shaped by capitalist crisis and the rise of social media. But what marks the distinctively social character of "social media"? And how does it relate to the wider social and economic context of contemporary capitalism? The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is based on the idea that a socially responsible capitalism is possible; this suggests that capitalist media corporations can not only enable social interaction and cooperation but also be socially responsible. This book provides a critical and provocative perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in media and communication industries. It examines both the academic discourse on CSR and actual corporate practices in the media sector, offering a double critique that reveals contradictions between corporate interests and social responsibilities. Marisol Sandoval's political economic analysis of Apple, AT&T, Google, HP, Microsoft, News Corp, The Walt Disney Company and Vivendi shows that media and communication in the twenty-first century are confronted with fundamental social responsibility challenges. From software patents and intellectual property rights to privacy on the Internet, from working conditions in electronics manufacturing to hidden flows of eWaste - this book encourages the reader to explore the multifaceted social (ir)responsibilities that shape commercial media landscapes today. It makes a compelling argument for thinking beyond the corporate in order to envision and bring about truly social media. It will interest students and scholars of media studies, cultural industry studies, sociology, information society studies, organization studies, political economy, business and management.

eBook Price: £39.59

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

This book represents the definitive research collection for corporate social responsibility communication, offering cross-disciplinary and international perspectives from the top scholars in the field. Addresses a gap in the existing CSR literature Demonstrates the relevance of effective CSR communication for the management of organizations The 28 contributions come from top scholars in public relations, organizational communication, reputation management, marketing and management

eBook Price: $44.99

Publisher : MIT Press

An examination of the cognitive foundations of intuitions about the existence and attributes of God. Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously--at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos--even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.

Price: $40.00
Format : eBook Available

Publisher : Routledge

The cognitive science of religion is a new discipline that looks at the roots of religious belief in the cognitive architecture of the human mind. The Roots of Religion deals with the philosophical and theological implications of the cognitive science of religion which grounds religious belief in human cognitive structures: religious belief is 'natural', in a way that even scientific thought is not. Does this new discipline support religious belief, undermine it, or is it, despite many claims, perhaps eventually neutral? This subject is of immense importance, particularly given the rise of the 'new atheism'. Philosophers and theologians from North America, UK and Australia, explore the alleged conflict between truth claims and examine the roots of religion in human nature. Is it less 'natural' to be an atheist than to believe in God, or gods? On the other hand, if we can explain theism psychologically, have we explained it away. Can it still claim any truth? This book debates these and related issues.

eBook Price: £35.99