The concept that business must be socially responsible sounds appealing until we ask, “Responsible to whom?” A corporation’s task environment includes a large number of groups with interest in a business organization’s activities. These groups are referred to as stakeholders because they affect or are affected by the achievement of the firm’s objectives. Should a corporation be responsible only to some of these groups, or does business have an equal responsibility to all of them?
A survey of the U.S. general public by Harris Poll revealed that 95% of the respondents felt that U.S. corporations owe something to their workers and the communities in which they operate and that they should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities. People were concerned that business executives seemed to be more interested in making profits and boosting their own pay than they were in the safety and
quality of the products made by their companies. The percentage of the U.S. general public that agreed that business leaders could be trusted to do what is right “most of the time or almost always” fell from 36% in 2002 to 28% in 2006. These negative feelings receive some support from a study that revealed that the CEOs at the 50 U.S. companies that outsourced the greatest number of jobs received a greater increase in pay than did the CEOs of 365 U.S. firms overall.