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Corporate Social Responsibility And Its Effect On The Community

Decent Essays

Corporate social responsibility is the voluntary actions firms take in order to address both its own competitive interests and the interests of wider society. Firms endeavour to integrate their principles and ethics into their production process, employee treatment and impact to the community as CSR affects the ways in which its stakeholders perceive a firm and this influences their behaviour towards the firm; and in turn profits. Stakeholders are those who are affected or can affect the firms’ performance, for example shareholders, investors, customers, employees, supplier and the government. CSR is the way a company conducts its business in relation to ethics, sustainability and transparency (Van Marrewijk 2003).
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Carroll, a scholar on the topic. “The social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical and discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time.” His definition is commonly used as it is open to the continuous change in CSR efforts and is highly applicable today as he writes “at a given point in time”. Also his definition is very broad and talks about both economic and ethical responsibilities of stakeholder.
Another useful definition is by the European Commission who describes CSR as: “A concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis” (EU 2010). The EU’s definition is greatly applied as it’s more recent and contains two key elements, the social and the environmental aspects.
Lastly the International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility defined CSR as “… the responsibility of an organization for the impact of its decisions activities on society and environment, though transparent and ethical behaviour that a) contributes to sustainable development, health and welfare of society; b) takes into account the expectation of stakeholders; c) is in compliance with applicable law and consistent with international norms of behaviour; and d) is integrated though the organization and practised in its relationships” (Blowfield and Murray, 2011). iii. SYNONYMS OF CSR

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