Corporate social responsibility and poverty alleviation: A conceptual framework

We present a conceptual framework that explains the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and poverty alleviation, underpinned by Amartya Sen's conceptualisation of poverty. The framework takes a stakeholder perspective of the firm and provides a theoretical perspective on how business can alleviate poverty at the micro level. By examining the relationship between CSR and poverty alleviation we depart from much of the existing theoretical CSR literature concerned with CSR's impact on firm performance and the factors that motivate firms to adopt CSR. To this end, we make a contribution to the seldom studied question of CSR's impact on stakeholders.