Serbia confronting a leadership vacuum

Abstract

In the last few years many new inquiries have taken place in the "collective", institutional parts of economic dynamics and several tentative findings suggest that the concept of CSR can be used as the analytic for the assessment of dimensions of corporative social performances. The idea of CSR presupposes some forms of bounded social world within which the allocation, the distribution of economic resources and the determination of the scale of corporate business activities come into existence. According to this, the corporative context is partly non-functional and resorts to the intrinsic motivation of the agents and to the responsibility of people who manage the corporations (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001; Barclay & Smith, 2003; Birch, 2003; Greenfield, 2004; Manokha, 2004). It is to be mentioned that some theoreticians are sceptical about CSR as the blanket term and corporation-as-person theory. The CSR advocates argue that on the basis of managing social and environmental issues, companies will perform better financially with less risk in the long run. As the recent corporations-related meltdown events have demonstrated, the management systems, per se, offer no assurance of improved ethical performance. It is necessary to articulate the aspects of CSR in the light of the common ground of the existing market society. When corporations praise the free market, they often (too often, actually) mean freedom from having to subordinate the use of property to external value. The market power of the corporations serves as a means of escaping from market's freedom of entry condition; consequently, market power of corporations is the means to unmake the entry to market on the basis of industrial protection and intellectual poverty (Kingston, 2000). Many firms have adopted some of the relevant CSR management techniques, but there is a lack of information on whether or not social and environmental performance has, in reality, been altered. CSR gets relevance only through a systematic approach defining the changes needed to make business responsible and sustainable. The CSR discourse is legitimised if it proves to be an impetus for the rethinking of the structure of the contemporary market society and the massive rents of corporations, i.e. the structural tendencies of the non-responsible property rights in the context of the "race to the bottom". One potential path of interpretation is to differentiate the features of responsibility in connection to the diverse components (economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary or philanthropic). Also, there is corporate social responsibility, at the institutional, organisational, and individual levels. At the organisational level, CSR addresses public responsibility in that businesses are responsible for outcomes related to their embeddedness within society. In addition, at the individual level, the principle of managerial discretion states that managers are moral actors. Within every field of corporate social responsibility, they are obliged to exercise such discretion as is available to them, toward socially responsible outcomes. This principle is not limited to corporate philanthropy or community involvement, but covers the entire area of managerial actions. It is very important to accentuate this principle in the case of Serbia, in fact, in Serbian corporate law the manager is a leader in the strong sense. In addition, this position of manager is in line with the earlier tradition. Without any exaggeration we could say that his/her discretion power and impact on the corporation practice is enormous. Accordingly, any reflection on the corporate responsibility in Serbia should begin with the elucidation of the manager's responsibility in relation to the social embeddedness of the corporation. In order to avoid the empty normativity it is always indispensable to interpret the apparent contextual dimensions of CSR that are to be detected as the starting point of further reconsideration. Above all my interpretation stresses the ambiguous character of the meaning of CSR in Serbia. This article covers matters as diverse as law and government, corruption-practices, war, and so on. Some trends are simply ignored and others dealt with rather summarily. The purpose is to shed light on the complex social processes in and through which specific institutional orders and their broader social preconditions are structured in Serbia.