Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility
The different aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been the topic of considerable debate since the last decades of the twentieth century. Main factor for the increased interest on the part of stakeholders in this topic are the increased public awareness and interest in the corporate social responsibility following the Information Revolution. This essay will assess the dangers and benefits of the business ethics for most of the stakeholders – employees, organizations, society, shareholders and the environment. It will also explore specific examples of corporate social responsibility in different large corporations and will make a comparison between two large companies’ ethical policies. The position that I will defend is that people behind corporations are the ones who can be philanthropic but enterprises themselves can only be driven by the laws of market (which in the modern economic reality in most Western countries demands an increasing attention to business ethics).
According to Boddy (2008) some entrepreneurs like Titus Salt, Jeremiah Coleman and George Cadbury developed their enterprises with social responsibility and philanthropy from the start of the Industrial Revolution. However until the last decades of the twentieth century the dominant view was that the profit making organization’s responsibility to its shareholders should be set above all other responsibilities. Buchanan and Huczynski (2010) argue that the significance of corporate social responsibility has increased dramatically in the last decades because of two main reasons: the number of high profile corporate scandals (significant examples could be found in the fate of the United States’ giant corporations Enron and Worldcom) and the increased media scrutiny of organization practices. As Rollinson (2008) argues, the organizational responsibility to the wider society is provoked by the increased public interest and is stimulated by government
The different aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been the topic of considerable debate since the last decades of the twentieth century. Main factor for the increased interest on the part of stakeholders in this topic are the increased public awareness and interest in the corporate social responsibility following the Information Revolution. This essay will assess the dangers and benefits of the business ethics for most of the stakeholders – employees, organizations, society, shareholders and the environment. It will also explore specific examples of corporate social responsibility in different large corporations and will make a comparison between two large companies’ ethical policies. The position that I will defend is that people behind corporations are the ones who can be philanthropic but enterprises themselves can only be driven by the laws of market (which in the modern economic reality in most Western countries demands an increasing attention to business ethics).
According to Boddy (2008) some entrepreneurs like Titus Salt, Jeremiah Coleman and George Cadbury developed their enterprises with social responsibility and philanthropy from the start of the Industrial Revolution. However until the last decades of the twentieth century the dominant view was that the profit making organization’s responsibility to its shareholders should be set above all other responsibilities. Buchanan and Huczynski (2010) argue that the significance of corporate social responsibility has increased dramatically in the last decades because of two main reasons: the number of high profile corporate scandals (significant examples could be found in the fate of the United States’ giant corporations Enron and Worldcom) and the increased media scrutiny of organization practices. As Rollinson (2008) argues, the organizational responsibility to the wider society is provoked by the increased public interest and is stimulated by government
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