The Corporate Social Responsibility Continuum as a Component of Stakeholder Theory

There has been much discussion in recent decades about the extent of a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) obligations (see, for example, Van Marrewijk, 2003). Beginning with Friedman’s 1962 shareholder primacy perspective, whose sole focus was on the firm’s responsibility to its owners, and moving to a stakeholder primacy perspective, an expanded notion of a firm’s obligations to all relevant stakeholders, not just owners, the topic has been debated by many management and marketing scholars (see, for example, Donaldson and Preston, 1995; Greenley and Foxall, 1998; Miles and White, 1998; Mintzberg et al., 2002; Polonsky, 1995; Polonsky et al., 2002; Sirgy and Lee, 1996).