Importance Of Corporate Social Responsibility

1093 Words5 Pages
it is necessary to ensure that approaches to corporate social responsibility are coherent and compliant with Community policies and with international obligations. In Denmark, the Minister for Social Affairs launched the campaign “Our Common Concern - the social responsibility of the corporate sector” in 1994 and set up the Copenhagen Centre in 1998. In the UK, a Minister for Corporate Social Responsibility has been appointed in March 2000. An Interdepartmental Group has been established to improve co-ordination of activity to promote corporate social responsibility across the government. At the international level, through policies such as trade and development cooperation, the European Union is directly involved in issues concerning market…show more content…
Being socially responsible means not only fulfilling legal expectations, but also going beyond compliance and investing “more” into human capital, the environment and the relations with stakeholders. The experience with investment in environmentally responsible technologies and business practice suggests that going beyond legal compliance can contribute to a company’s…show more content…
Whilst investors still expect firms to maximize profits, the public has become increasingly aware of the importance of the social and environmental impact of businesses. Firms are now expected to make every reasonable effort to reduce their negative externalities—or such harms as pollution that they cause whilst pursuing their business activities—and to increase their positive externalities, or their impacts on addressing important social and environmental problems, such as poverty reduction. The expansion of economic globalization has created a political backlash: Many citizens regard its benefits as insufficient and its social and environmental costs too great. It has been associated with increased inequality, economic insecurity, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation. In addition, many governments, particularly in developing countries, appear either unable or unwilling to control the conduct of global firms and their complex global supply and distribution networks. This has created a marked imbalance between the power of large global firms and national government regulations: The former frequently appears to be overwhelming or undermining the latter. Corporate Social Responsibility has emerged as a way to fill in this “governance gap,” or to create a public domain between states and markets (TTF,
Open Document