Corporate Social Responsibility: The Perspective of Orthodox Islam

Abstract

The existing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Islam shows that researchers have tried to understand Islamic perspectives on CSR either by directly engaging with the sources of Islam or from the practices of Muslims. The views of orthodox Islamic scholars have been ignored even though many Western academics on Islam have argued that it is this group of individuals that shape and represent the authoritative understandings of Islam on any particular issue including CSR. This thesis brings this ignorance to an end. In it, I conceptualize normative Islamic CSR from the understandings of orthodox Islamic scholars using a qualitative research interview based methodology approach of phenomenology that is used in CSR research (see Khan and Lund‐ Thomsen, 2011). The study’s phenomenological data was generated by conducting face to face interviews with orthodox Islamic scholars (including several prominent ones) located in Pakistan. Analysis of the above mentioned data leads to the study’s major contributions to the Islam and CSR literature which are as follows: i. a comprehensive framework of Islamic CSR from the perspective of orthodox Islamic scholars; ii. an Islamic CSR continuum to categorize organizations based on their corporate social performance; iii. orthodox Islamic scholars’ views on the gap between Islamic CSR theory and practices of Muslim businessmen; and iv. incompatibility between Islamic teachings as understood by orthodox Islamic scholars and the ten principles of the UN Global Compact relating to responsible business. All these contributions challenge the existing understandings on Islam and CSR in Western academia and provide an additional alternative non‐Western perspective in CSR research. In this way, the thesis enriches and extends the conversations of CSR and Islam in Management and Organization Studies.