【正文】 tizenship that vary at each stage: Citizenship Concept: How is citizenship defined? How prehensive is it? Definitions of corporate citizenship are many and varied. The Center’s concept of citizenship considers the total actions of a corporation (mercial and philanthropic). Bettignies makes the point that terms such as citizenship and sustainability incorporate notions of ethics, philanthropy, stakeholder management, and social and environmental responsibilities into an integrative framework that guides corporate action. Strategic Intent: What is the purpose of citizenship in a pany? What it is trying to achieve through citizenship? Smith observes that few panies embrace a strictly moral mitment to citizenship。 rather, at the times noted, they were illustrative of citizenship at that development stage.) A close inspection of these panies reveals instances where they had a leadingedge practice in some dimensions but were less developed in others. This should e as no surprise. For example, the pace of a child’s physical, mental, and emotional development is seldom uniform. One facet typically develops faster than another. In the same way, the development of group and organizational capabilities is uneven. Firmspecific forces in society, industry dynamics, and other environmental influences feature in how citizenship develops within a firm. Stage 1. Elementary At this base stage, citizenship activity in a pany is episodic and its programs 9 are undeveloped. The reasons are straightforward: scant awareness of what corporate citizenship is all about, uninterested or indifferent top management, and limited or oneway interactions with external stakeholders, particularly in the social and environmental sectors. The mindset in these panies, and associated policies and practices, often centers on simple pliance with laws and industry standards. Responsibilities for handling matters of pliance in these firms are usually assigned to the functional heads of human resources, the legal department, investor relations, public relations, and munity affairs. The job of these functional managers is to make sure that the pany obeys the law and to keep problems that might arise from harming the firm’s reputation. In many cases, they take a defensive stance toward outside pressures—., Nike’s dealings with labor activists in the early 1990s. Some corporate leaders, for example, have espoused economist Milton Friedman’s notion that their pany’s obligations to society are solely to “make a profit, pay taxes, and provide jobs.”20 Others, particularly those heading smaller and midsize businesses, ply willingly with employment and health, safety, and environmental regulations but have neither the resources nor the wherewithal to do much more for their employees, munities, or society. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch is an exemplar of this principled bigbusiness view. “A CEO’s primary social responsibility is to assure the financial success of the pany,” he says. “Only a healthy, winning pany has the resources and capability to do the right thing.”21 GE’s financial success over the past two decades is unquestioned. However, the pany’s reputation suffered toward the end of Welch’s tenure when it was revealed that that one of its business units had discharged tons of the toxic chemical PCB into the Hudson River. When challenged, Welch was defensive and pointed out that GE had fully plied with then existing environmental protection laws. This illustrates one of the triggers that move a pany forward into a new stage of citizenship. Welch’s stance was plainly out of touch with changing expectations of corporate responsibilities and the contradiction between GE’s success at wealth creation and loss of reputation was palpable. Welch’s successor, Jeffrey Immelt, reversed this course, accepted at least partial financial responsibility for the clean up, and thereafter reprioritized citizenship on the pany’s agenda.