What is Corporate Social Responsibility?
November 13th, 2007 by Fabian
This is the question I am starting to discuss with this first blog entry dedicated to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). I will only give a short introduction and follow this up with further posts on this in the future. That is why will call this post Part 1.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, employees, shareholders, communities and the environment in all aspects of their operations. This obligation is seen to extend beyond the statutory obligation to comply with legislation and sees organizations voluntarily taking further steps to improve the quality of life for employees and their families as well as for the local community and society at large (CSR - Wikipedia).
I think it is fair to say that organisations mostly started to think about CSR 10-15 years ago when they began to be increasingly criticised from other groups like Greenpeace, WWF or other pressure groups to change their ways of doing business or at least change some of their ways of managing their environmental and social impacts.
CSR then really jumped on top of the global agenda when Shell was boycotted for the way it dealt with the disposal of the Brent Spar (Brent Spar).
After this boycott nearly bankrupted Shell, organisations all around the world started to take notice and developed their Plan B for public relations disasters like this.
This was when CSR was born.
This Plan B called CSR quickly developed into a more comprehensive list of actions and responsibilities and in the end to a complete management framework on how to (1) manage the expectations of your stakeholder, (2) change and manage the way you do business more responsibly and (3) take care of your environmental impacts. There are more areas to CSR but I think these three are the most known ones and good to start with when first reading about CSR.
CSR since then has grown continuously into a-must-have for organisations around the globe. No matter whether they have a complete management framework for CSR in place or a policy of some kind, CSR is different from one company to the other and needs to be a tailored approach to managing the responsibility within our society of this particular organisation. There are obviously good and bad examples in the world but overall one can say that CSR been promoting responsible business practice in the world. And this is a good thing.
This is enough for now with regards to CSR but one of the next posts will discuss the topics of CSR Reporting. CSR Reporting is in that way linked to CSR as these are the reports companies publish to communicate the their CSR activities.
All the best,
Fabian
Some more CSR definition resources (not many but the best I could find):
CSR - Wikipedia
CSR Definition
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Corporate Social Responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html
here is a good place to start.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:03 pm
New “Hybrid” Social Venture Model - new twist on CSR
Last year I founded a rather unique Social Venture (Impact Makers). We are based in Richmond VA, and although we have access to the Kellogg and Yale SOM alumni networks, we feel somewhat isolated from others doing similar social ventures and involved in CSR generally.
I think our model is fairly unique and provides for an interesting new “twist” in Corporate Social Responsibility.
Specifically, Impact Makers is a “social venture” operating in the management consulting space, and I believe is truly unique in that it:
- Provides professional services (currently focused in healthcare) at market prices
- Competes with other firms to win business
- Pays market salaries to its professionals
- Is a nonprofit structure with books open to the public
- Contributes all profits to community organizations (and consulting time)
** The interesting twist on CSR: at no additional cost to our corporate clients, they are able to transform their already budgeted IT / consulting services budget into social impact. In other words, simply by hiring Impact Makers, our corporate clients are able to tout their social impact / responsibility in their local community - at no cost. A good example - while a consultant at Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), I saw the firm give away 10% of profits to their Foundation ($100 million); however, that same year they had an IT consulting budget of over $800 million. If that budget went to Impact Makers or similar competitive social ventures, at 15% profit margin, the social impact of hiring Impact Makers (only measuring dollars donated to the community) would be larger than that of the entire foundation.
For a brief overview of our organization, you can visit our website at: http://www.impactmakers.org
Aside from local print press, we are also being covered on CNN Headline News in the local Richmond market – you can see the 5-minute video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dWEckHnxW4
FEEDBACK REQUESTED:
1) I would greatly welcome any thoughts on our model generally from a CSR perspective. For those in CSR - is this an interesting model to pursue?
2) This is an interesting way to expand the reach of CSR initiatives within corporations - any thoughts on how to include social impact on vendor selection criteria at large corporations? Does anyone know of this happenning today at any firms?
3) Any of you know other organizations doing something similar?
Please feel free to forward our website link to anyone that you think may be interested to further discuss our innovative new model.
I look forward to hearing from all Group members!
- Michael
December 10th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Eric…
Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts…..
December 14th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
The Long Arm of Corporate Social Responsibility…
Sustainability Blog, like many others, seem to think the practices of corporations, socially responsible or otherwise, are like the news on TV - we just watch it happen. There is another popular opinion that CSR is just a bunch……
February 5th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Your post is a great starting point for anyone who is new to corporate social responsibility. I’m new to that world and I just read about a company that takes it to a level they call “triple bottom line leadership”. Eileen McDargh covers this in her blog post at http://www.eileenmcdargh.com/blog/?p=106. It’s a thought provoking read.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
[...] will be the future of CSR? CSR has now been discussed in the companies across the globe for more the 15 years but a lot of people [...]