Corporate Social Responsibility for Sustainable Service Dominant Logic

Abstract: The process of globalization over the past five decades has given impetus to drivensustainability and related thinking in business. It is also observed that there areunprecedented trends in corporate strategy towards sustainable thinking - the emergenceof sustainability as corporate strategy and the concern of business for ecology and society.This forces companies to rethink their standard business models and increase theirinterest in innovating products and services based on the challenges of global sustainabledevelopment. The pressure from external stakeholders, mainly non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs), as drivers of change may also contribute strongly to thisendeavour. This substantial change pressure clearly reflects companies’ recognition of themounting pressures for social responsibility and governance. The overall aim of this thesisis to describe and understand how social responsibility and value-creation of customers’influence the overall service quality of companies in developing a sustainable servicebusiness.The theoretical and conceptual frame of reference finds its stimulation from the researchin sustainable development – corporate social responsibility, service research and qualitymanagement. In this way it attempts to bridge the gap between business and socialresponsibility. Theoretically and conceptually, the thesis amalgamates sustainabilitythinking and the service logic. Here, value creation and co-creation of Service DominantLogic (S-D logic) approach expands to integrate the values based approach of CorporateSocial Responsibility (CSR) in management thinking and have created the prevailingbusiness practices and service quality (SQ) improvement. This thesis is a compilation offive different papers that follow an interpretative case study approach. The empiricalstudy developed from the cases of multinational companies, small and mediumenterprises, smallholders and NGOs.In this thesis, ‘Sustainable Service Dominant Logic’ (SSDL) was labelled to argue thatvalue-based co-creation of the S-D logic framework can be used to create values-basedservices for sustainable business by examining the link between CSR and S-D logic basedon value, values and service quality for sustainable business. This is this thesis’scontribution to the ongoing discussion of the paradigm shift in service research. Theframework is of the integration of CSR thinking into service business to create sustainablebusiness thinking. This signifies the new thinking of incorporating different managementsystems in creating the organizational change process, sustainability and finally SQimprovement. This counters the critique against S-D logic by expanding the societal andethical dimensions by using CSR, and showing real business cases. This depends on theintegration of different change pressures for value creation, whether related to economicand social resource integration. This involves the shift of the focus of managerial controlfrom a preoccupation with financial issues to a wider awareness of CSR thinking. Theseissues are also explored by demonstrating, based on cases, how the adoption of thisperspective can also enable the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) framework to become animportant aspect of value creation. Finally, the paradigm shift can be generalized to newthinking in S-D logic and the social responsibility of businesses as the major phenomenonof the changing and globalizing business environment; time for the CSR framework to permeate S-D logic.