Strategic CSR provides a framework with which readers can explore these questions. This book identifies the key issues of debate, models them around conceptual frameworks, and provides both the means and resources to investigate this intensely complex topic. What makes this exploration exciting and worthy of study is that CSR is ever present: Jobs and job losses, financial bailouts and record profits, corruption and scientific breakthroughs, pollution and technological innovations, personal greed and corporate charity—all spring from the relentless drive for innovation in the pursuit of profit that we call business. As such, CSR can only be studied at the heart of operations, where core competencies mold the business strategies that enable firms to compete with each other. And when they compete in the marketplace, CSR offers a sustainable path between unbridled capitalism and rigidly regulated economies. CSR helps managers optimize both the ends of profit and the means of execution by creating value for the firm’s broad range of stakeholders.