Costs and Benefits of Corporate Responsibility Programmes

This article offers valuable insights on corporate social and environmental programmes, based on a pragmatic investigation-with two goals: (a) to derive the concept of participative stakeholders from an interpretation of micro-case studies of voluntary corporate initiatives, and (b) to produce a graphical instrument which facilitates the assessment of costs and benefits arising from the implementation of a company's responsibility policy. The methodological approach is built on the qualitative stance of grounded theory, combined with the outputs of diagrammatic representation and the principles of financial accounting. The strong point of this paper lies in its concern with practical issues and applied reasoning, in conjunction with a large number of diagrams and eleven real-life cases of stakeholder management. The reader is taken step by step in this process of discovering the pivotal role of participative stakeholders and their reciprocities with the firm.