Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate law and governance are at the forefront of regulatory activities worldwide, and subject to increasing public attention in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Comprehensively referencing the key debates, the Handbook provides a much-needed framework for understanding the aims and methods of legal research in the field.

This volume sets the agenda for a developing field of thought from a variety of perspectives from academia, policy, business and the professions. Articulating current thinking, each subject is represented by a scholarly presentation, together with responses from other researchers and practitioners in the field. The book explores and critiques corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals and national, organizational and managerial strategies, whilst reviewing the importance, sustainability and long term value of CSR practice to corporations and civil society.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) expresses a fundamental morality in the way a company behaves toward society. It follows ethical behavior toward stakeholders and recognizes the spirit of the legal and regulatory environment. The idea of CSR gained momentum in the late 1950s and 1960s with the expansion of large conglomerate corporations and became a popular subject in the 1980s with R. Edward Freeman's Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach and the many key works of Archie B. Carroll, Peter F. Drucker, and others. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2010, CSR has again become a focus for evaluating corporate behavior. First published in 1953, Howard R. Bowen’s Social Responsibilities of the Businessman was the first comprehensive discussion of business ethics and social responsibility. It created a foundation by which business executives and academics could consider the subjects as part of strategic planning and managerial decision-making. Though written in another era, it is regularly and increasingly cited because of its relevance to the current ethical issues of business operations in the United States. Many experts believe it to be the seminal book on corporate social responsibility. This new edition of the book includes an introduction by Jean-Pascal Gond, Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Cass Business School, City University of London, and a foreword by Peter Geoffrey Bowen, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, who is Howard R. Bowen's eldest son.

This text discusses several topics of interest in corporate social responsibility that include the identity and image of CSR; the relationship between disclosure and assurance in sustainability reporting; proposed methodology for measuring the published information on clients and human resources; total respect management; CSR and financial performance; as well as challenges, issues, and benefits of CSR on business performance.

The term corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often used in the boardroom, classroom, and political platform, but what does it really mean? Do corporations have ethical or philanthropic duties beyond their obligations to comply with the law? How does CSR relate to business ethics, stakeholder management, sustainability, and corporate citizenship? Mark Schwartz provides a concise, cutting-edge introduction to the topic, analyzing many case studies with the help of his innovative “Three Domain Approach” to CSR. Corporate Social Responsibility also provides a chronology of landmark contributions to the concept of CSR and includes CSR resources on organizations, global codes and criteria, corporate CSR reports, and websites and blogs. It is an invaluable resource for students, instructors, and business leaders looking to master the basics of CSR.

Since the general acceptance of the field of corporate social responsibility worldwide, corporate entities and those who act for them either as executives or "ordinary" employees are expected to be socially responsible. Being socially responsible has a number of quantifiable and unquantifiable benefits for the entity and its stakeholders. It improves the entity’s bottom line results, protects jobs, and is also better for the environment. As such, it makes good sense for professionals and those that they interact with as colleagues, suppliers of goods and services, lenders etc to want to take the issue of CSR seriously. This perhaps explains why this book has chosen to explore how 19 professions across the world have integrated and continue to impress upon their staff the importance of CSR in their operational activities. We are constantly reminded that our world’s natural resources are exhaustible; we can therefore no longer live for today alone if we do not want to cause substantial problems for future generations.

This book highlights the multi-faceted nature of corporate social responsibility and the need for greater engagement across academia to help develop the mechanisms needed to encourage socially responsible approaches across the board. The product of a cross-disciplinary collaboration of authors from various academic disciplines, the book reflects the emergent diversity of academics now studying corporate social responsibility (CSR). Accordingly, it includes contributions from economists to social anthropologists, from accountants to philosophers, and from clinical psychologists to social geographers. Together they provide new insights into aspects that challenge, hinder and enable CSR practitioners and corporations with regard to their financial impact and accountability, governance and supply chains. The book is divided into four parts focusing on the practical, sociological, theoretical and environmental aspects of corporate social responsibility.

The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating and addressing key issues such as the introduction of new forms of management, control, and discipline through ethical and environmental governance or the extent to which corporate responsibility challenges existing patterns of inequality rather than generating new geographies of inclusion and exclusion.