Corporate & Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (or CSR as we will call it throughout this book) is a concept that has become dominant in business reporting. Every corporation has a policy concerning CSR and produces a report annually detailing its activity. And of course, each of us claims to be able to recognize corporate activity which is socially responsible and activity that is not socially responsible. There are two interesting points about this: firstly we do not necessarily agree with each other about what is socially responsible, and although we claim to recognize what it is or is not when we are asked to define it then we find this impossibly difficult. Thus, the number of different definitions is huge and in this chapter, we will look at some of these.