ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major shock to our collective systems – and a potential catalyst to redefine what exactly corporate social responsibility (CSR) means and to rethink the newly emerging and still amorphous responsibilities of business in society. The goals of this chapter are to revisit Carroll's Pyramid of CSR model in light of the recent societal changes and to help advance a new theoretical lens to understand the dynamic relationships between stakeholders and corporations. Focusing on multinational corporations (MNCs) as authoritative societal actors, a case study helps deepen our understanding of the ways in which the pandemic has fundamentally shifted how CSR is enacted and communicated to stakeholders in the new global-socio-economic landscape. This chapter argues that CSR has evolved from its categorical four-part definition in the pyramid model to a more relational and communicative understanding of the responsibilities of corporations in the post-pandemic society. CSR may still be corporate-based, but it is not necessarily corporate-controlled anymore. Moving beyond managerial frameworks, the future of theory building in CSR lies in the critical and relational approaches. Relationalism can provide a lens for better understanding the relational turn in CSR, capturing the dynamic, nonlinear, and complex relationships between stakeholders and corporations.
