Research and Management Insights

Business needs to better understand how to view social responsibility in operations, which is where it interacts with society, and make operational sense of overlapping concepts such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, and shared value. ManMohan Sodhi offers ‘stakeholder resource-based view’ (SRBV) to deal with the challenges in implementing social responsibility that managers (and researchers) face including the multitude of objectives. SRBV entails identifying stakeholders, including the senior and middle managers of the company, within any chosen scope of operations – a plant in one location or a part of the supply chain in a particular continent – and then look into how these stakeholders are better off in their own terms as a consequence of these operations. SRBV therefore provides a way to avoid the ‘supply-side’ trap of companies presenting good deeds without requiring that those supposedly helped thus are actually better off. From a CSR perspective, SRBV helps extend company’s social responsibility and values to its operations including to any part of its supply chain. Making the benefits and benefit drivers of different stakeholders explicit by using SRBV can help managers weigh near-term profits against social responsibility.