ABSTRACT
Debates about the role of business in general have been protracted and heavily contested for over half a century. Milton Friedman (1970: 126), the American economist, was in absolutely no doubt. For him, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profi ts’. His views have been interpreted as a throwback to the movement that gathered traction in the 1950s and 1960s, towards recognising and acting on the wider social, environmental and even cultural
responsibilities of business. Tracing its genealogy back to the employee welfare and community schemes of nineteenth-century philanthropists, several luminaries had argued that business does not operate in isolation, entirely separate from society and the environment that exists around it. Instead, business have a duty of stewardship to those who work for them, who live in the communities where they operate, to respect the environments from which they derive value, and not just to act on behalf of their investors, shareholders and customers.
