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Corporate social responsibility and external stakeholders’ health and wellbeing: A viewpoint.

ABSTRACT: In recent years there has been increased interest in the role played by business corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies in promoting the health and wellbeing of internal and external stakeholders. However, the sparse public health research to date has mainly focused on the health and wellbeing of internal stakeholders. This viewpoint article aims to ignite discussion of how CSR strategies need to also target external stakeholders beyond the workplace. Businesses have an opportunity to help address the most important societal challenges, especially the social determinants of health which are the root causes of inequities in health. However, while advancing a new agenda for promoting external stakeholders’ health, businesses need to take into account potential challenges that might arise from ethical conflicts when trying to balance their CSR initiatives against their business operations.Significance for public healthThe role of businesses in improving public health has mainly been described from the workplace perspective, in terms of employee health and wellbeing. This viewpoint argues that it is time for businesses to also contribute to the improvement of health and wellbeing in society at large, using corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies to help address the social determinants of health as a way to contribute to health equity and the triple bottom line.

SUBMITTER: Hiswals A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7282312 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundThe workplace has been identified as a priority setting for health promotion. There are potential advantages of systematically integrating Occupational Health Management (OHM) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, OHM and CSR are usually overseen by different management branches with different sets of values, and there is a lack of empirical research regarding interfaces between OHM and CSR. Germany offers a particularly useful setting due to legislation requiring health to be promoted in the workplace. This study aims to examine key stakeholders' views and experiences regarding interfaces between OHM and CSR in German companies.MethodsIndividual semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with a sample of 77 German stakeholders from three different groups: experts in occupational health and corporate social responsibility from various companies (n = 35), business partners (n = 19), and various non-business partners (n = 23). Transcripts were analysed using qualitative content analysis.ResultsParticipants identified several areas in which OHM and CSR are already interacting at strategic, structural and cultural levels, but also highlighted several barriers that undermine a more meaningful interaction. Participants reported difficulties in articulating the underlying ethical values relevant to both OHM and CSR at the strategic level. Several structural barriers were also highlighted, including a lack of resources (both financial and knowledge), and OHM and CSR departments not being fully developed or undertaken at entirely different operational levels. Finally, the missing practical implementation of corporate philosophy was identified as a critical cultural barrier to interfaces between OHM and CSR, with existing guidelines and companies' philosophies that already connect OHM and CSR not being embraced by employees and managers.ConclusionsThere is already significant overlap in the focus of OHM and CSR, at the structural, strategic and cultural levels in many German companies. The potential is there, both in theory and practice, for the systematic combination of OHM and CSR. The insights from this study will be useful to ensure that closer integration between both management branches is set up in a socially sustainable and ethical manner.

Project description:BackgroundIn contemporary complex societies, social values like ethics, corporate social responsibility, and being respectful with the environment, among others, are becoming social requirements. Corporations are expected to fulfill them and, according to empirical evidence, an overwhelming majority aspires to good social valuation. At the same time, the maximization of market share value in the long run continues to be the central corporate goal. Making environmental and social expenses compatible with value creation is a central challenge for corporations since it implies the financial sustainability of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).Methods and resultsThe value creation capacity of CSR projects, mainly through innovation, is widely acknowledged in economic literature and corporate practice. This fact arouses the need of having a quantitative framework capable of summarizing the value creation capacity of the variables involved in CSR projects. With this aim we build up a sensitivity analysis of real option ratios that studies and quantifies the value creation capacity of CSR projects connected with innovation. Ratio analysis has the advantage of being scale independent. Hence, it furnishes a homogeneous framework to express the interaction of value creation variables and, thus, supports strategic thinking quantitatively. Often, CSR expenses can be regarded as preliminary projects that create the opportunity to undertake a full future project. For them, we obtain the minimum expectations scenario that makes financially sustainable a preliminary project that can be interpreted as a call option. We propose a classification of CSR projects from the decision analysis perspective following a two-fold approach: Their relationship with value creation and their links with existing corporate activities. This classification of CSR projects aims at contributing to choose the best capital budgeting method to study the financial sustainability of the project and identifying those CSR projects that fulfill the required features to be studied from the real options perspective.

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Corporate social responsibility and external stakeholders’ health and wellbeing: A viewpoint.

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