APPROACHES TO MEETING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Lipson, a desirable and socially responsive approach to meeting social obligations does the following:

1. Incorporates social goals into the annual planning process.
2. Seeks comparative industry norms for social programs.
3. Presents reports to organization members, the board of directors, and stockholders on social responsibility progress.
4. Experiments with different approaches for measuring social performance.
5. Attempts to measure the cost of social programs as well as the return on social program investments.

S. Prakash Sethi presents 3 management approaches to meeting social obligations:

1. Social Obligation Approach: It considers business as having primarily economic purposes and confines social responsibility activity mainly to existing legislation.                            
2. Social Responsibility Approach: It sees business as having both economic and societal goals.                                                                    
3. Social Responsive Approach: It considers business as having both societal and economic goals as well as the obligation to anitcipate potential social problems and work actively toward preventing their occurence.

CONVERTING ORGANIZATION POLICIES ON SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY INTO ACTION:

A policy is a mangement tool that furnishes broad guidelines for channeling management thinking in specific directions.

To be effective, social responsibility policies must be converted into appropriate action.

PHASE 1: It consists of the recognition by Top Management that the organization has some social obligation. Top Management then must formulate and communicate some policy about the acceptance of this obligation to all organization members.

PHASE 2: It involves staff personnel as well as Top Management. In this phase, top management gathers information related to meeting the social obligation accepted in phase 1. Staff Personnel are generally involved at this point to give advice on technical matters related to meeting the acceppted social obligation.

PHASE 3: It involves division management in addition to the organization personnel already involved from the first 2 phases.

During this phase, top management strives to obtain the commitment of organization members to live up to the accepted social obligation and attempts to create realistic expectations about the effects of such a commitment on organizational productivity.

Staff specialists encourage the responses within the organization necessary to meet the accepted social obligation properly; and division management commits resources and modifies exisiting procedures so that appropriate socially oriented activities can and will be performed within the organization.