Corporate Responsibility in Small States like Malta: a Luxury Companies Can Ill Afford?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), or simply Corporate Responsibility for those who favour an even broader approach, has become yet another buzzword in an age of sound bites where ideas fall into and out of fashion rapidly. For those who view big business as a continued source of inequality and destruction in the global village, the possibility that CSR may be a temporary trend is far from welcoming. As a process which appears to be driven primarily by the direct, and less direct, profit-making potential of catering to more socially and environmentally aware customer markets, there is every possibility that CSR may be discarded in the future as more lucrative opportunities open up to those seeking profits. Viewing CSR as a permanent development in business culture may be to expect too much of corporations which, as Friedman argued, remain social constructs which do not exist without the legal and social devices of the community within which they were created or operate. Therefore, the corporation is nothing without the individuals that make up that society and it is those individuals that have responsibilities, not the corporations.