CSR in India: Critical Review and Exploring Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Abstract

The current discourse on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is dominated by this ‘middle path’ approach, establishing collaboration and synergy, and attempting to define the balancing roles of business. In the CSR literature, interactions between business and society have been studied less. CSR research is also skewed towards the western and developed countries. We attempt to address these two issues by studying perception gaps among the community residing in a mining region and tourist destination in western India, Goa. The studied dimensions are company’s commitment to the community, areas for company’s support, company’s involvement with stakeholders, community’s commitment to the company, and media’s role to promote CSR activity and CSR as benefiting the company. In general, the variables such as age, education, place of origin and caste lead to divergence in community attitude towards various CSR dimensions. Later, we review a few unique and successful CSR projects, their design and implementation with a strategic ‘entrepreneurial orientation’. Our article points towards a new paradigm for CSR implementation that is beyond pure philanthropy. Innovative models are being discovered and designed with pro-activeness and reasonable experimentation which provide these corporates unique competitive advantage. Lastly, we propose that entrepreneurship has a viable role to play in balancing community and business interest.

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