What Does Corporate Social Responsibility Mean? Corporate initiative to assess and take responsibility for the company's effects on the environment and impact on social welfare. The term generally applies to company efforts that go beyond what may be required by regulators or environmental protection groups. Corporate social responsibility may also be referred to as "corporate citizenship" and can involve incurring short-term costs that do not provide an immediate financial benefit to the company, but instead promote positive social and environmental change. Read more: http://www.

investopedia. om/terms/c/corp-social-responsibility. asp#ixzz1czJWBme6 Companies have a lot of power in the community and in the national economy. They control a lot of assets, and may have billions in cash at their disposal for socially conscious investments and programs. Some companies may engage in "greenwashing", or feigning interest in corporate responsibility, but many large corporations are devoting real time and money to environmental sustainability programs, alternative energy/cleantech, and various social welfare initiatives to benefit employees, customers, and the community at large.

Read more: http://www. investopedia. com/terms/c/corp-social-responsibility. asp#ixzz1czJcrBfr What Does Social Responsibility Mean? The principle that companies should contribute to the welfare of society and not be solely devoted to maximizing profits.

Investopedia explains Social Responsibility Socially responsible companies can act in a number of ways to benefit society. For example, companies can give money to the arts, fund academic scholarships, support community-building initiatives, and so on. They can also commit to not pollute or to reduce the pollution they put out, to not uild weapons, and so forth. Read more: http://www. investopedia. com/terms/s/socialresponsibility.

asp#ixzz1czJs768v * Corporate social responsibility – emphasizes obligation and accountability to society * Corporate social responsiveness – emphasizes action, activity * Corporate social performance – emphasizes outcomes, results * CSR relates primarily to achieving outcomes from organizational decisions concerning specific issues or problems, which by some normative standard have beneficial rather than adverse effects upon pertinent corporate stakeholders.The normative correctness of the products of corporate action have been the main focus of CSR (Epstein) * Demonstrate a commitment to society’s values and contribute to society’s social, environmental, and economic goals through action. * Insulate society from the negative impacts of company operations, products and services. * Share benefits of company activities with key stakeholders as well as with shareholders. * Demonstrate that the company can make more money by doing the right thing.Corporate citizenship embraces all the facets of corporate social responsibility, responsiveness and performance Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate conscience, corporate citizenship, social performance, or sustainable responsible business)[1] is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model.

CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms.The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company's actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere. Furthermore, CSR-focused businesses would proactively promote the public interest (PI) by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality.CSR is the deliberate inclusion of PI into corporate decision-making, that is the core business of the company or firm, and the honouring of a triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. The term "corporate social responsibility" came into common use in the late 1960s and early 1970s after many multinational corporations formed the term stakeholder, meaning those on whom an organization's activities have an impact. It was used to describe corporate owners beyond shareholders as a result of an influential book by R.

Edward Freeman, Strategic management: a stakeholder approach in 1984. [2] Proponents argue that corporations make more long term profits by operating with a perspective, while critics argue that CSR distracts from the economic role of businesses. Others argue CSR is merely window-dressing, or an attempt to pre-empt the role of governments as a watchdog over powerful multinational corporations. CSR is titled to aid an organization's mission as well as a guide to what the company stands for and will uphold to its consumers.

Development business ethics is one of the forms of applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business environment. ISO 26000 is the recognized international standard for CSR. Public sector organizations (the United Nations for example) adhere to the triple bottom line (TBL). It is widely accepted that CSR adheres to similar principles but with no formal act of legislation. The UN has developed the Principles for Responsible Investment as guidelines for investing entities. orporate social responsibility Definition A company’s sense of responsibility towards the community and environment (both ecological and social) in which it operates.

Companies express this citizenship (1) through their waste and pollution reduction processes, (2) by contributing educational and social programs, and (3) by earning adequate returns on the employed resources. See also corporate citizenship. Four Types of Corporate Social Responsibility Environmental Responsibility People expect businesses to exhibit environmentally responsible behavior, as evidenced by a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey that found that the No. 1 issue for companies in the future, according to U. S.

respondents, is carbon emissions reductions. Specific environmental issues that affect businesses include global warming, sustainable resources and pollution. Businesses are being urged by environmental groups and governments to reduce their carbon footprint, to obtain their materials from sustainable sources and to reduce their pollution.Read more: Four Types of Corporate Social Responsibility | eHow. com http://www.

ehow. com/info_8117691_four-types-corporate-social-responsibility. html#ixzz1czPnlviw Human Rights Responsibility * The 21st-century marketplace is highly global. This means that when a product is purchased in the United States, for example, it may have been produced in China, or have components from South America. The ethical issue for corporations is ensuring that human rights are respected throughout all levels of the supply chain.Major companies have received criticism for their use of sweat shops and for sourcing resources that are harvested by unfairly treated workers.

This has lead to a push for the use of strict labor standards to be applied to suppliers, and a demand for fair trade products such as chocolate and coffee. Read more: Four Types of Corporate Social Responsibility | eHow. com http://www. ehow. com/info_8117691_four-types-corporate-social-responsibility.

html#ixzz1czPvslRZ Financial Responsibility * Financial responsibility is an important issue in corporate social responsibility.In the wake of the accounting fraud perpetrated by Enron and Arthur Andersen and Ponzi schemes orchestrated by the likes of Bernie Madoff, businesses are questioned about the accuracy of their financial reporting by increasingly skeptical shareholders and government officials, as evidenced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Employees are expected to act as whistle blowers in such situations, and white collar crime is seeing high-profile prosecutions like that of Martha Stewart or former Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers.Political Responsibility * Trading with repressive regimes is a difficult issue in corporate social responsibility.

Some businesses argue that working with these regimes will help to advance them and bring rights to the countries. People and governments have demanded that businesses stop trading with repressive regimes, which was most notably observed when several western governments launched an embargo against the Apartheid government in South Africa during the 1980s.Shell Oil received considerable consumer backlash during the 1990s for its complicit involvement with the Nigerian government that murdered anti-oil activists. These issues make doing business with certain governments an important consideration for corporate social responsibility. Read more: Four Types of Corporate Social Responsibility | eHow. com http://www.

ehow. com/info_8117691_four-types-corporate-social-responsibility. tml#ixzz1czQ4ZZ1M Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become indispensable in modern business discourse; yet identifying and defining what CSR means is open to contest. Although such contestation is not uncommon with concepts found in the social sciences, for CSR it presents some difficulty for theoretical and empirical analysis, especially with regards to verifying that diverse application of the concept is consistent or concomitant.

On the other hand, it seems unfeasible that the diversity of issues addressed under the CSR umbrella would yield to a singular universal definition.Gallie, an eminent philosophical scholar, proposed the essentially contested concepts (ECC) theory in 1956 to address concepts that by their very nature engender perpetual disputes. He pointed out that there are certain concepts which by their very nature are inevitably contested and prescribed seven criteria for evaluating such concepts. This article examines these criteria to discover if CSR is an essen- tially contested concept and in that case, to construe if such a change in perception will resolve the definitional crisis. The analysis suggests that CSR is an ECC