Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment * Correspondence to: Anette Hallin, INDEK, KTH (The Royal Institute of Technology), SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: anette.hallin@ indek.kth.se Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 206–216 (2009) Published online 19 June 2009 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/csr.203 Managing Death – Corporate Social Responsibility and Tragedy Anette Hallin 1 * and Tina Karrbom Gustavsson 2 1 The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden 2 Development Director, Flemingsberg, Sweden ABSTRACT Drawing on the true story of the actions of a middle manager in a major industrial company after the unexpected death of one of his employees, while participating in one of the most important social rituals to humans and society – the creation of meaning of death – we take an analytical approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR). This is done by discuss- ing the overlap between CSR and human resource management (HRM). The story induces us to question the upholding of CSR an HRM as separate theoretical fields, since the managerial practice seems to indicate that these have merged into one. Also, the story indicates that the borders between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ roles in managerial practice are blurred and that to be a middle manager today is quite complicated. The article finishes with a discussion on why the writing of policies may not be the answer to this problem. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 14 April 2008; revised 12 November 2008; accepted 7 March 2009 Keywords: death; corporate social responsibility; human resource management; borders; middle management; public; private Managing Death T HE YOUNG, NEWLY APPOINTED, NATIVE SWEDISH MIDDLE MANAGER FACED A DILEMMA. ONE OF HIS EMPLOYEES, A man in his early fifties who had worked for the company for many years, had recently died and as his boss, the manager wanted to attend the memorial ceremony as an act of respect. Having worked with this older colleague for several years, the manager knew some details about his employee’s private life; for example that he was an immigrant from an Asian country, that he had recently gone through a divorce and that he had two sons. With very limited personal experience of memorial services, either Swedish or foreign, and not knowing the company policy or routine for this kind of situation – he decided to follow his intuition and use his own judgment. After discussing it with his wife he decided to dress according to the Swedish dress code for this kind of occasion. Even though she understood him, his wife wasn’t too happy with her husband’s decision to leave her and the kids alone on a Sunday to go on job-related business. On his way to the service, which was to be held in the Community Hall in one of the immigrant suburbs of the city, the manager passed a florist where he bought flowers and a card on which he wrote: ‘We think of you. Your fellow workers.’ At the Community Hall, the manager realized that the memorial service was definitely not the small, family matter he had expected. Instead, the Community Hall was filled with a few hundred people, apart from family, relatives, a couple