The Corporate Social Responsibility Agenda

The following sections are included:

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• INTRODUCTION

I always start a new CSR course by asking students the following questions: What does CSR mean to you? What form does it take? The most common answers by far are: “Charities, donations to communities”, especially among non-European students. This, I believe, reflects the most widespread view on CSR today: Corporate social responsibility is little more than a well-packaged, updated version of good old philanthropy which has existed for ages in many places around the world. So is CSR ultimately just a rebranded version of a long-established business practice? This could partly explain the skepticism surrounding CSR, all too often viewed as a mere corporate public relations exercise aimed at embellishing the facade…

One of the very first concepts that come to mind when considering CSR is that of the “stakeholders”. The term, coined in the 1980s, has become a buzzword today, not only in the field of CSR, but more generally in management and political sciences. It generally refers to all the categories of people who are involved in and affected by an organization…

Everybody would agree on the fact that employees are key stakeholders of CSR. Employee support and involvement seems empirically fundamental to the deployment of CSR policies within the company. This intuition was already present at the birth of the CSR concept: Indeed, one of Bowen’s main preoccupations in his seminal book was that of adequate labor supply. He firmly believed that a socially responsible company would both attract the best talent and enhance employee morale…

Whereas the relation between CSR and employee representation seems to remain largely ignored, the question of human rights has become a key issue of the CSR agenda over the last 10 years…

As we have observed, the concept of CSR is complex, given the various interpretations behind it. If I were to ask millenials what CSR is, they would certainly cite the environment first. Yet, for several decades CSR did not explicitly focus on the environment, even though Bowen did have some visionary insights into environmental issues. In the same way, CSR for most of the world today is associated with community-related actions, i.e. human-centered priorities… which seems meaningful for developing countries whose governments lack the means or the will to provide their people with decent living and working conditions…

CSR has become a buzzword around the world. From Peru to China, from Vietnam to Russia, from Kenya to the Emirates, more and more local companies are developing CSR actions and policies, local NGOs and grassroots organizations are created to promote CSR and business schools are integrating it in their curricula…

The following sections are included:

• CONCLUSION
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX