Corporate social responsibility in the Hong Kong and Asia Pacific construction industry

The growth of interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been stimulated by a series of scandals, not least of which was the Enron debacle. Professor Ghoshal of the London Business School, in the Financial Times (18 July, 2003) under the headline ‘Business Schools share the blame for Enronitis,’ pertinently opined that the blame lay squarely on the shoulders of the professors of business and that business schools ‘need to own up to their own role in creating Enronitis’. He went on to blame the ‘misinterpretation’ of Michael Jensen’s agency theory, Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost economics and Michael Porter’s competitive strategies as a prime cause of this unbalanced view which was bad for society. Ghoshal concluded that by incorporating negative and highly pessimistic assumptions about people and institutions, pseudo-scientific theories of management have done much to reinforce, if not create, pathological behavior on the part of managers and companies.