CSR in Europe: A New Micro-Social Contract?

This paper adopts Donaldson and Dunfee’s (1999) approach to business ethics to examine the consequences of a fragile social contract regarding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for companies and governments in Europe. Drawing on Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT), the development of a specifically European policy on CSR might be viewed as a “micro-social contract”. However, factual evidence reveals the limitations for the European approach so far. In this sense, it would be important to identify and discuss whether the process of promoting CSR in the EU could then be seen as an attempt to establish a new social contract between society and enterprises, specifically European, and based in part on shared political traditions (consented and accepted) and partly in universal ideals (macro-social contract), on which also would be a consensus in Europe. For this purpose, the EU’s key texts, initiatives and official documents on CSR have been analyzed to testthe robustness of this attempt.