Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) played a critical role globally in alleviating the miseries of people suffering from the severe impact of the pandemic. In this context, CSR presented a pathway to defend customer trust, stakeholder confidence, and employees’ allegiance during the pandemic. The lesson learnt was that CSR practices are a significant tool for responding to a crisis. The transformation that COVID-19 brought upon the world has rendered old systems outdated. Corporations are, therefore, focused on aligning their practices with engrained socio-economic problems, like poverty, unemployment, and inequality, which the pandemic aggravated. The COVID-19 pandemic saw the concept of CSR tested intensely, a situation that has driven an increase in scholarly research and discourse. This paper revisits the quintessential debate on CSR in light of the pandemic and offers some primary investigation on how this affected the advances of CSR. An exploratory qualitative research methodology will be applied to analyse corporations’ CSR responses during the pandemic. We attest that the COVID-19 pandemic presented extensive opportunities for businesses to move to more genuine CSR, to step up to tackle pressing global social and environmental challenges, and to be partners in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper examines the urgent requirement to comprehend and evaluate the CSR response from a readiness, response, regaining, risk mitigation, and resilience perspective. This examination will allow for better understanding, assessment, and measurement of the impact of both long- and short-term initiatives.

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