Conceptualising Social Responsibility in Operations via Stakeholder Resource-Based View

Abstract

To conceptualize social responsibility for operations management (OM) research, we consider the corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and the bottom-of-the-pyramid approaches and argue that we need to study operations through a social responsibility lens rather than to classify operations as being socially responsible or not. There are three challenges to developing such a lens: the level of analysis, the multitude of objectives, and the theoretical underpinnings. We propose a ‘stakeholder resource-based view’ (SRBV) building on resource-based view, stakeholder theory, and utility theory to address these challenges, treating all stakeholders on a par. The different stakeholders seek to maximize their own (expected) utility, with different drivers shaping their preferences, using their respective resources, routines and dynamic capabilities. SRBV affords a descriptive framework for qualitative research, an instrumental framework for empirical research, and a normative framework for analytical research. It enables tackling many of the opportunities for OM research, some of which we outline.

Keywords: Social responsibility, CSR, sustainability, level of analysis, objectives, theory building; resource-based view, stakeholder theory. utility theory, research opportunities