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Best Practices: Strategies for CSR

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  Why do companies take up CSR activities? Sprinkle & Maines (2010) claim that organizations may engage in CSR activities for 4 reasons: organizations may have altruistic intentions; they may use CSR activities as “window dressing” to appease various stakeholder groups; for potential benefits of recruitment, motivation and retainment of employees; for customer-related motivations as CSR may entice consumers to buy organization’s products and services. Weber (2008) indicates five key areas where CSR creates positive relations: Positive effect on organization‘s image and reputation; positive effect on employee motivation, retention and recruitment; cost savings; revenue increases from higher sales and market share; and CSR-related risk reduction or management. Polonsky & Jevons (2009) found that possible reasons to organizations of being socially responsible include: improved financial performance; contribution to market value; a more general positive impact on societal sta...
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CSR Evolution - Part 3 : Track of the Concept

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  Corporate Social Responsibility as a  management concept as we know it today is mainly a product of the twentieth century, taking shape in the early 1950s. In the mid-to-late 1800s, there was growing concern about worker wellbeing and productivity among industrialists. industrial betterment and welfare movements at the time were viewed as a combination of humanitarianism and business acumen. Although responsible companies had already existed for more than a century before, the term Corporate Social Responsibility was officially coined in 1953 by American economist Howard Bowen in his publication  Social Responsibilities of the Businessman . As such, Bowen is often referred to as the father of CSR. In 1971, the concept of the ‘social contract’ between businesses and society was introduced by the Committee for Economic Development in USA. This contract brought forward the idea that companies function and exist because of public consent and, therefore, there is an obligati...
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CSR: Challenges and Implementation

  Corporate social responsibility and its equally important companion,  environmental, social, and corporate governance  (ESG) principles have risen to new prominence in a world where how you do business—and how your business activities reflect your company’s  affects not only your bottom line, but your ability to operate, compete, and attract talent, investors, and customers. Today’s consumer is no longer content to know only what a company’s selling, or the services it offers. They are, in large part, also very concerned with the policies and practices companies hold with regard to prominent social and environmental issues—and for companies with an undeveloped, ill-considered, or (perhaps worst of all) absent response, those consumers are happy to take their interest, and dollars, elsewhere In 2011,  less than one in five  companies on the S&P 500 had published formalized documentation of the business practices they’d developed in relation to corp...
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