COMPLYING WITH CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY DEMANDS IN A CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT (THE CASE OF MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS)

Abstract: Corporate Social Responsibility has been a very topical issue in contemporary times, but an in-depth understanding of this salient concept is quite questionable to many including actors in corporate spheres. This we could attribute to ignorance or limited research work to propagate what corporate social responsibility means and the benefits it may bring forth if properly adhered to by corporations. This paper thus has as fundamental focus to clarify and enhance the understanding of corporate social responsibility as well as the extent to which corporations adhere to the ever increasing demands emanating from stakeholders (consumers, governments, employees, environmental activists etc) for socially responsibility. The extent to which corporate social responsibility is a valid criterion to judge the actions of corporations is also of special interest in this research work. This paper adopts a theoretical and an empirical approach to provide a better understanding of corporate social responsibility, while a broad based exploratory case study approach is used to investigate the activities of some selected multinationals across the globe .We used three management responsibility categories technique to bridge our findings to our conclusions that the management style of multinationals examined fall under the immoral category associated highly with socially irresponsible companies which typically do not consider stakeholder interests. The paper unravels the devastative effects of their activities on consumers, the environment, employees, and local communities whose interest and well being they should enhance from the corporate social responsibility perspective. The paper concludes with some limitations encountered in this study and suggestions for further research.