“When money is more valuable than people…”: The pandemic as a call for business to care

Heidi Reed ()
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Heidi Reed: Audencia Business School, Nantes

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Abstract: Abstract The COVID‐19 pandemic created extreme conditions in which the need for care was overwhelming and led to competing stakeholder demands. What are society's expectations of business in such conditions, and how might these expectations challenge traditional understandings of the business in society relationship? Using a qualitative survey during the initial stages of the pandemic, the study draws on participants from the US public to identify what they viewed as responsible and irresponsible business behavior in response to the COVID‐19 crisis. Analysis reveals that participants' perceptions are strongly rooted in ethics of care reasoning. This reasoning exposes gaps in CSR and stakeholder theories around "who and what really counts", while offering a different conception of balancing business self‐interest with external demands. Drawing on this finding, the study joins scholarship highlighting the need for a political care movement and argues that untangling care from neoliberal capitalist logics would resolve many of the competing stakeholder demands and paradoxes that characterize grand challenges such as the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Keywords: competing demands COVID-19 CSR ethics of care grand challenges stakeholder theory; competing demands; COVID-19; CSR; ethics of care; grand challenges; stakeholder theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke
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Published in Gender, Work and Organization, 2023, 31 (2), pp.435-455. ⟨10.1111/gwao.13080⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04461114

DOI: 10.1111/gwao.13080

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