Corporate Social Responsibility: A Strategy for Change Toward an Ethical Development Model?

The International Conference on "The Pending Ethical Agenda of Latin America," held on December, 2003, in Montevideo, Uruguay, with the participation of international institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, universities and renowned economists, such as Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, are evidence that the prevalence of economic over social and human aspects, a distinctive feature of the neoliberal development model, is being questioned and proposals for change based on ethical principles that have been embraced by the United Nations under the name of "World Pact" are being presented, providing a base for the management strategy called Corporate Social Responsibility. Thus, a critical and hermeneutic analysis of this strategy and its underlying principles is justified in order to study its potential to enact changes in the development model. As a result of this study, contributions, limitations and new questions were detected, allowing the authors to make proposals for an ethical concept of development.