Corporate Social Reponsibility of the Tobacco Industry

According to Harvard University, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a business strategy that encompasses the ways in which an organisation manages its economic, social and environmental impact. As such, the methods of managing an organisation’s impact can decide whether the organisation is ethical or unethical. There are eight principles stated in the Global Business Standards Codex (GBSC) which assist in the assessment of ethics of an organisation or industry (Paine et al. 2005). These principles of the GBSC set the standard in an economic, social and environmental sense which all organisations in the global economy should adhere to. Therefore, the tobacco industry’s (TI) use of CSR strategy is unethical. This is because the TI’s use of CSR fails to adhere by the transparency, dignity and citizenship principles of the GBSC. Nevertheless, there are advantages and disadvantages of the TI using CSR strategies which benefit the stakeholders. Hence the CSR strategy used by the TI is nevertheless a valid strategy in the sense that this strategy improves the TI’s unethical public image.

The TI is breaching the transparency principle by using CSR strategies to create a façade so that it can be perceived by the general public as an ethical industry. This is in violation of the transparency principle as the TI is not conducting business in an open and truthful manner. However it can be argued that the TI isn’t required to enclose all information and that adhering to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) index is legally enough (Global Reporting Initiative 2012). By meeting the minimum requirements of the GRI index, major tobacco companies can maintain their competitive advantage by not revealing their marketing strategies which the transparency principle would require.

Nevertheless, the TI has been professed as an industry which solely focuses its resources on maximising profit which disregards the health of its users let it be first hand or second hand (World