Corporate Social Responsibility with HIV / AIDS Drugs :: Social Responsibility Essays

â€Å"Each year, just three diseases kill 5.4 million people worldwide. Malaria kills at least one million, mainly in developing countries, with 90% of the deaths in Africa. Tuberculosis causes 1.9 million deaths a year, almost all of them in developing countries, where resistance to the five major anti-tubercular drugs is spreading. Some 400,000 of the tuberculosis victims are also HIV positive. The yearly death toll for HIV/Aids is almost 2.5 million, with about 1.8 million concentrated in the Sub-Saharan Africa† The Times Higher 20/07/01 Assess the responsibilities of the pharmaceutical companies for providing low cost drugs to the poor people in the developing countries. There is no generally accepted definition for corporate social responsibility (CSR), although various theorists have attempted to surmise one. One useful definition is provided by Archie Carroll (1979): ‘The social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical and discretionary expectations that society has of organisations at a given point in time’ Another definition is offered by Kok et al: ‘The obligation of the firm to use its resources in ways to benefit society, through committed participation as a member of society, taking into account the society at large and improving the welfare of society at large independent of direct gains of the company.’ An alternative definition by Frederick et al (1988): ‘business and society are interdependent and co-exist, with business using society's resources and, in turn, fulfilling economic needs and changing social goals Thus, business and society are bound by a reciprocal "social contract" which is seen as the "core idea of corporate social responsibility† These definitions encapsulate the notion that business has a responsibility to society as a whole, aside from the basic profit maximising ideas dictated by traditional free-market theory. in direct contrast from the classical economic sense of increasing shareholder wealth (Friedman, 1970) that it is a ‘fundamentally a subversive doctrine’. In the pharmaceutical industry has ia system that produces drugs in two categories. Category A would include drugs for conditions like