ABSTRACT

The American economist Harold Rothmann Bowen posited in his book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman ( 1953) that business people have some social responsibilities towards society; and his definition of corporate responsibility as ‘the obligations of businessmen to purse those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society’ was in fact the genesis of modern corporate social responsibility (CSR). But many counter arguments have been put forward by scholars such as Levitt (1958), Friedman (1962), Lippke (1996) and Henderson (2001), who see things differently from Bowen. Despite that, one cannot help but acknowledge that Bowen’s book marks the evolution of serious discussion of the field of CSR and the advancements we have made globally to date in the field.