Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility

Name:

Course name: The Ethical Leader

Due date: 02/11/2012

Introduction

Corporate Social Responsibility is a way of operating the business that cares about its social and environmental impacts. Many companies integrated Social Responsibility as a way of building a good reputation, social acceptance, competitiveness and long-term sustainability. Modern society requires the companies to behave as a ‘good citizens’. Otherwise, their refusal quickly reflects on their market price and the companies are forced to accept the concept if they want to survive. There are numerous dilemmas about CSR that are being discussed among scientists around the world.

Dilemmas about CSR

It became clear that every company needs to put a lot of effort in order to improve their relationships with shareholders. Every piece of that system has to be aware of those efforts in order to secure their position on the market. Stock market prices are showing that the companies that accepted that way of behavior sooner than the others are now enjoying great advantage. Some of the rules that are considered as socially responsible are being required by law. The first dilemma I’ve had was: Should such a behavior be officially required by the law? If they are, it would be beneficial for everybody, at least for certain period of time. At the same time the differences between truly socially responsible companies and the companies that are forced to act that way would disappear. In my opinion, those differences are crucial for keeping the level of ethical principles at least as high as they were. Forcing anybody to do the right thing has never been a good way to do it. More efficient way is to let the market leaders, who got there because they accepted socially responsible politics, to simply lead the way and serve as the models to the other companies. As an example, Denmark was the first country that included CSR report in annual reports for 1100 biggest...