Abstract
In the twenty-first century, corporate social responsibility is not a new phenomenon to India’s capitalist development model. Instead, the concept itself is implicitly rooted in traditional values, customs, and ideal systems of charismatic leaders. Trusteeship is one such ideal notion of Gandhi’s work on economic justice and equality, which influence business communities for voluntary activities. However, with exposure to globalization, the adaptation of new economic policy and its adverse impacts changed business communities’ role towards voluntary activities and forced the state for the enactment of statutory provisions through the Companies Act 2013. In this context, the present paper employed the content and content configuration analysis method to analyze the relevance of these two ideas—trusteeship and statutory provision of CSR, in the current state of development. For that, the paper makes a comparative analysis between these two ideas with their eight inherent similar segments. After comparing and interrogating what present CSR deficient, the paper concludes that the alternative and future of Indian CSR practice and sustainability lie within the practice of trusteeship. Corporate and state need to incorporate the Gandhian idea of “trusteeship” within the present CSR framework to achieve a long-term sustainable society.
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Acknowledgements
The author is thankful to the AJBE Editorial Team for extending their continuous support in the publication process. The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions in the original draft that helps in the quality improvement of the manuscript. The author is also thankful to Dr. Tanaya Mohanty, Prof. Navaneeta Rath, Chinmayee Mishra, Archita Bala Patra of Department of Sociology, Utkal University, and Bamadev Mahapatra of IIT-ISM Dhanbad for their constructive insights to improve the manuscript.
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Mohapatra, B. Corporate social responsibility in India: rethinking Gandhi’s doctrine of trusteeship in the twenty-first century. Asian J Bus Ethics 10, 61–84 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13520-021-00121-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13520-021-00121-2