Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate governance (CG), corporate citizenship and triple bottom line (TBL) became more or less synonyms for the emerging effort to determine the meaning of ethical business. In broadest sense, all these agendas aim to translate the complexity and holism of business-society interface into organizational realities and operational settings (Lunheim, 2003)

As a conclusion, it can be stated that the implementation of the CSR agenda imporoved the competitive advantage of the business.
Aspects of CSR
* Internal Dimension
* External Dimension
These aspects are adapted from the European Commission’s Green Paper (Eurpean Comission, 2001); The Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index (Knoepfel, 2001), Mallenbaker (2003) and Kok et al, (2001)

Insights

CSR can serve as a vehicle for business improvement and building of competitive advantage for SMEs.

Questions

What is CSR? CSR is about how companies manage the business processes to produce an overall positive impact on society.

What are the drivers of both initial and continuing SME engagement? Drivers of both initial and continuing SME engagement include personal interest and fulfillment, a desire to implement just good business practice, improved morale and motivation, giving something back to the local community and enhancing business reputation.

What are the main barriers of further engagement? Fear of bureaucracy, time and cost are the main barriers to further engagement, but interestingly this is not the experience of most of the SMEs who are engaged. In other words, barriers tend to be built or perceptions rather than reality.

Applications

In order to run organizations profitably yet in a socially and environmentally responsible way, SMEs run a concept called CSR. This enables to achieve business sustainability and stakeholders satisfaction.

Reference

Knoepfel, I. 2001. Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index: a global benchmark for corporate sustainability, corporate environmental Strategy 8(1): 6-15

Kok P, Van der Wiele T, McKenna R, Brown A. 2001. A corporate social responsibility audit within a quality management framework. Journal of Business Ethics 31: 285-297

Lunheim R. 2003. Operationalising corporate social responsibility. In visions of Ethical Business. FT Prentice-Hall in association with PriceWaterHouseCoopers: London.