The Incentives of a Common Good-Based CSR for SDG’s Achievement: The Importance of Mission Statement

Abstract

The normative stakeholder theory is the most appealing approach for business in order to achieve the SDGs and an ethical corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, the incentives for managers to follow a normative rather than an instrumental approach to stakeholders’ management are unclear. Indeed, in both cases they have the duty to satisfy stakeholders’ interests (in the latter case with the aim to maximize profit, in the former with the awareness that stakeholders, as persons or groups, have needs and wants to be cared). The chapter would find out incentives for managers to implement an ethically driven CSR by linking the stakeholders’ normative concept to the common good from catholic social teaching (Argandoña 1998). Those incentives are intrinsic and transcendent needs to be satisfied together with the virtuous cycle generated by a business oriented to the common good. However, how could managers start orienting their business to the common good? Literature on mission statement gives the answer considering it as the main tool to spread ethics in business and orients firms to act in compliance with ethical principles.