Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (or CSR as we will call it throughout this book) is a concept which has become dominant in business reporting. Every corporation has a policy concerning CSR and produces a report annually detailing its activity. And of course each of us claims to beable to recognise corporate activity which is socially responsible and activity which is not socially responsible. There are two interesting pints about this: firstly we do not necessarily agree with each other about what is socially responsible; and although we claim to recognise what it is or is not when we are asked to define it then we find this impossibly difficult. Thus the number of different definitions is huge and is this chapter we will look at some of these.