An African Paradigm for Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

One of the important aspects of corporate governance or business ethics is corporate social responsibility (CSR). Apart from its concern for intra and inter-corporate moral conducts, business ethics is also occupied with moral regulation of general corporate conduct with respect to their socio-environmental relations. It enlightens business organisations of their responsibility to their communities of operation, in terms of maintaining the society and environment. This is because a community within which an organisation operates its business is an equal stakeholder in the business. There are several theories of CSR. But they are problematic in persuading corporations to undertake the responsibility as obligation. Each theory attracts the sort of objections that dissuade and ultimately truncate genuine understanding and undertaking of the responsibility. And if the responsibility is not undertaken, society and environment would incline to perilous consequences from ever-capitalist ambitions of businesses. There is the urgent need, therefore, to redefine the morality in some way that would persuade corporations to undertake the responsibility as obligation. That is the objective of this essay. And it is achieved through ancient or traditional (or aboriginal) African existentialist-ontological interpretation of the responsibility as an inevitable sense of duty actuated by human socio economic tendency to engage in commerce with universal hospitality.