The Future of Corporate Social Responsibility

In 1996, a nun from Philadelphia sparked a debate with a Silicon Valley CEO over corporate social responsibility.1 Sister Doris Gormley of the Sisters of St. Francis wrote a letter to Cypress Semiconductor protesting the lack of women and minorities on the board of directors. The CEO, T. J. Rogers, shot back a reply in which he labeled the Sister's view "immoral" and urged her to get down from her "moral high horse." Rogers said that choosing directors based on gender or race is "a lousy way to run a company," and he vowed that Cypress would never do it because "bowing to well-meaning, special interest groups is an immoral way to run a company." This exchange is revealing because it exposes a fault line between past conceptions of corporate social responsibility and the future. Over the past fifty years, and especially in the last two decades, the structure of American companies and the conditions under which they operate have been dramatically transformed. These changes in the world of business have inevitably affected the meaning of corporate social responsibility and the arguments for and against it. I do not propose to take sides in the debate. Both Sister Doris and T. J. Rogers accept some assumptions about corporate social responsibility that are now out-of-date. We need to move beyond the terms in which the