Roles and Responsibilities of Functional Areas Towards an Organization's Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

The gap between the socially responsible behaviour of corporate and the legitimate expectations from society continues to remain. There is a need to bridge the gap between society's expectations and the corporate CSR agenda to make the CSR initiatives more meaningful for humanity. Hence, studying the CSR roles and responsibilities of various functional areas and their importance and challenges in fulfilling them becomes imperative. The existing literature focuses on a single function, and the relative importance of multiple functions of an organisation in owning and delivering the CSR mandate remains unexplored. To unveil the phenomenon of 'what' and 'how', the third dimension that needs to be meticulously explored surrounds 'who'. This paper is an attempt to fill this void in contemporary CSR literature. The researchers have studied research papers published in the last 20 years that focus on any functional responsibilities in a corporate setup. Keeping the Global Reporting Initiative (G4) as the base, the researchers have explored the relative importance and responsibility of specific functional areas of an organisation. It resulted in finding the gaps in terms of less or no representation of some functional areas, which they suggest to add in CSR discussion.