CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A THREE-DOMAIN APPROACH Mark S. Schwartz and Archie B. Carroll Abstract: Extrapolating from Carroll's four domains of corporate socia! responsibility (1979) and Pyramid of CSR II99I), an alternative ap- proach to conceptualizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) is proposed. A three-domain approach is presented in which the three core domains of economic, legal, and ethical responsibilities are de- picted in a Venn model framework. The Venn framework yields seven CSR categories resulting from the overlap of the three core domains. Corporate examples are suggested and classified according to the new model, followed by a discussion of limitations and teaching and research implications. F or the past several decades, the debate over the proper relationship between business and society has focused on the topic of corporate social responsi- bility (CSR) (Klonoski 1991). In the modern era, the stage was set for this debate by Keith Davis, who posed two intriguing questions in the 1960s: "What does the businessperson owe society?" (Davis 1967) and "Can business afford to ignore its social responsibilities?" (Davis 1960). Although many have attempted to define CSR over the years, the concept has remained vague and ambiguous to some (Makower 1994: 12). Definitions of CSR fall into two general schools of thought, those that argue that business is obligated only to maximize profits within the boundaries of the law and minimal ethical constraints (Friedman 1970; Levitt 1958), and those that have suggested a broader range of obligations to- ward society (Andrews 1973; Carroll 1979; Davis and Blomstrom 1975; Epstein 1987; McGuire 1963). An important attempt to bridge the gap between economics and other expec- tations was offered by Archie Carroll (1979). His efforts culminated in the following proposed definition of corporate social responsibility: ' The social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethi- cal, atid discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time. (1979: 500, emphasis added) As a helpful way of graphically depicting the components of his CSR defini- tion and expounding upon them, he later incorporated his four-part categorization into a "Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility" (1991; 1993). Carroll's Pyramid of CSR is presented in Figure 1. © 2003. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 13, Issue 4. ISSN 1052-150X. pp. 503-530