Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been an important subject for businesses for many years; however because of the situation in the world today, with the environment, the Greenhouse effect, financial crisis etc, the subject is more important than ever. The controversies about the globalization process have raised a lot of questions regarding the management of both multinational enterprises and small businesses in both developed and developing countries, and whether some organizations are pursuing profits at the expense of vulnerable workforces, the fragile environment, etc.

Globalization has put a lot of pressure on businesses in the sense of development, and solutions such as liberalism and public ownership have become self-explanatory. The competition in the world’s marketplace has become tougher, not only because of the competition but also because of the pressure for stakeholders. The reactions to this kind of concerns have been that organizations have increasingly taken steps towards improvements of their social responsibilities and more and more started to demonstrate it. There are different reasons for implementing CRS within organizations, and different approaches and strategies to do so. For small and medium sized enterprises adapting CSR might become a high cost and they choose not to, or to only some extent.

CSR could be a way to solve major global problems like unacceptable working conditions for employees or increasing the level of unhealthy discharges for the environment. If not, the CSR movements made by organizations show that their responsibilities does not only lie in profit making, but in the process of how profits are being made. It can easily be argued that companies should focus on making profits, since that is one of most important measurements of success, and that development and other responsibilities should be up to the governments. However this would be an ineffective strategy for a company to take, since the market for profit maximization does not take into account social roles such as reducing unemployment, creating education possibilities and helping developing countries in their developing process. As I see it, developing countries have two options; they can either wait, and let the globalization turn the country into a socially responsible business area, or they can act; work from inside the organizations and build on an already existing, but weak, concept of CSR. They can follow MNE’s examples and improve their CSR standards in order to become a more international payer on the global marketplace.