Corporate Social Responsibility

Mohamed El Mehdi ZOUHAIR OL 690-G4042

CSR definition

Corporate Social Responsibility refers to the responsibilities a company has towards its stakeholders including its employees, its customers, and the environment.

Corporate social responsibility refers to the business practice of monitoring and ensuring that a firm's activities meet social, economic and environmental expectations.

Businesses that practice CSR promote the public interest and encourage community growth and development

Because of workers who were subjected to systematic exploitation (low wages, inhumane working conditions, military discipline on the shop floor, frequent unemployment), and because they were viewed as objects, new principles were born.

After the Second World War, In France, Belgium, Great Britain, the employers, the chambers of commerce, constantly opposed each regulation (work time, regular inspections, and compulsory school attendance) that could constitute, in their opinion, unfair competition.

These good principles do not hold out for a longtime anyway. Those good principles are always put forward to mask the reality. As is underscored by the sociologist Michel Vilette: “They say what those who suffer from an inverse Reality would like to hear” (Le Monde de l’Économie - 03.12.02).

But for me the most important point in the CSR is the voluntary action.

We need to see a voluntary integration, by the companies, of social and environmental concerns into their commercial activities and their relations with various stakeholders.

In spite of the fact that the demand for CSR is growing, there has always been critics. The most influential critic is Noble Prize winner Milton Friedman, who claims CSR to be a waste of stockholders’ money. However, several articles claim, opposite Friedman, that CSR rather increases a company’s financial performance in the long run