The Legitimacy Of Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement, which is accompanied by a series of social contradictions caused by economic globalization such as polarization of rich and poor, labor conflicts, poverty, is an issue of global ethics. The changing of CSR theory is based on its concept,limits,basic elements, which shows that it was changing from abstract ethics regulation then practical research to their practical combination. The nature of CSR is an ethical responsibility, it is proposed in order to re-interpret and understand the relationship between corporation and social ethics. The legitimacy of CSR, positively speaking, is a problem of ethics justification, and its rationality is based on internal requirements of corporation,the need of social justice realization and social harmony development; While negatively speaking, the legitimacy of CSR is a problem of social responsibility's limit. The limit of CSR refers to the responsibility scopes corporations should bear for society according to their mission,competence and function. The limit of CSR legitimacy is based on: corporation's scale,ownership nature,economic goal,stakeholders' need,circumstance of social existence. Only with advanced theory in the light of actuality to highly grasp the limit of CSR could it be justified. Under the background of economy globalization, the popular SA8000 standard, which acts as a specific moral standard to guide corporations' CSR fulfillment, has certain enlightenment for fulfilling CSR legitimately. At present, our country's impropriety of CSR mainly behaves as the deficiency of law responsibility,the contradiction between moral requirement and morel practical fulfillment ability, which should be improved through improving corporation's internal management mechanism and through intensifying corporation's external mechanism, so that the corporations and society could exist in a harmonious way.