why CSR is important for corporations
Since the origins in the middle of last century (Spector, 2008 cited in Carroll and Shabana, 2010: 86), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been becoming an increasingly influencing factor in corporate governance. KPMG (2008 cited in Du et al., 2010: 13) indicates that the proportion of the 250 hugest enterprises in the world who annually release CSR reports has grown up from 50% in 2005 to 80% in 2008. Porter and Kramer (2006: 80) declare that CSR is more likely to be advantages such as ‘opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage’ for a company rather than disadvantages such as ‘cost, constraint or charitable deed’. This essay aims to explain and evaluate the extent to which this statement implies, and the benefits and drawbacks of CSR in terms of the short run and long run development in corporations.
The complicated connotation of CSR results in the difficulty of understanding intensively and application efficiently. Despite the wide range of definition, CSR generally refers to the obligation to ‘meet or exceed the expectations of stakeholders’ beyond economic and legal means, but including human, environmental and ethical perspective (Cable, 2005 cited in Mullins 2010: 713). In this sense, CSR is coping with the interest of itself and all those who have interest and can be affected by an organisation’s operations. Henriques (2004: 27) puts forward that the stakeholder issues can be classified as the triple bottom line (economic, social and environmental). In order to achieve the sustainability both in corporations and society, making CSR strategy synthetically and balancing the triple bottom line are necessary.
Even though being a socially desirable event at present, there do also exist some objective arguments that CSR might have some negative influence and reduce competitiveness in the short term. First of all, there is no doubt that taking social responsibility could lead to an increase in financial expense for corporations. CSR diverts
The complicated connotation of CSR results in the difficulty of understanding intensively and application efficiently. Despite the wide range of definition, CSR generally refers to the obligation to ‘meet or exceed the expectations of stakeholders’ beyond economic and legal means, but including human, environmental and ethical perspective (Cable, 2005 cited in Mullins 2010: 713). In this sense, CSR is coping with the interest of itself and all those who have interest and can be affected by an organisation’s operations. Henriques (2004: 27) puts forward that the stakeholder issues can be classified as the triple bottom line (economic, social and environmental). In order to achieve the sustainability both in corporations and society, making CSR strategy synthetically and balancing the triple bottom line are necessary.
Even though being a socially desirable event at present, there do also exist some objective arguments that CSR might have some negative influence and reduce competitiveness in the short term. First of all, there is no doubt that taking social responsibility could lead to an increase in financial expense for corporations. CSR diverts