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Corporate Social Responsibility Essay

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Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a very controversial topic. A question that has been debated for the past few decades is; is it corporately viable to introduce social responsibility as a proposed addition to the work ethic of business organisations. As well as, if adopting the framework of corporate social responsibility would yield positive improvements for those organisations.

The purpose of this essay is to research the notion of CSR and uncover its true framework and outline what social responsibility truly means to corporate organisations, and whether it should be seriously considered to be a legitimate addition to the corporate framework of an organisation.

This will be done by …show more content…

However, nowadays CSR is simply defined as ?operating a business in a manner that meets or exceeds the ethical, legal, commercial and public expectations that society demands of business? (Gillis & Spring 2001: 23).

Corporate citizenship is commonly defined as ?a company's management of its influences on and relationships with the rest of society? (Marsden 2000: 9). A recent study conducted by Hill and Knowlton found that 79% of Americans consider corporate citizenship when deciding to buy a particular company?s product, 36% of which considered corporate citizenship to be an important factor (Verschoor, 2001: 20). This shows us that by achieving good corporate citizenship, a company?s practices become transparent to the interested public and provide a basis for accountability for the future (Waddock, 2000: 324).

The stakeholder theory made popular by Ed Freeman (1984) does seem to represent a major advance over the classical view (Freeman, 1984). It might seem inappropriate to refer to the stakeholder position as neoclassical. Bowie (1991: 56-66) has defined stakeholders as a group whose existence was necessary for the survival of the firm--stockholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the local community, and managers themselves.

The framework of corporate social responsibility is such that it is relatively complex and multidimensional. A three-dimensional

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