History Of Corporate Social Responsibility

This chapter will give us a quick glance about what social responsibility is and from where it comes. We will start with the history of CSR and is definition by many authors. In a next section we will look at some concepts which are used very often to talk about social responsibility.

1.1. History of corporate social responsibility

Despite the fact that the term of CSR may appear to be relatively new to the corporate world, the literature reveal that the development of the concept itself has taken place over several decades. As for the definition of CSR in the corporate and the academic world there is no single definition regarding all the effort to bring out a clear and unbiased definition. The fact that everything is evolving such as political,

The second epoch was marked in 1953 when Howard Bowen published the book of The Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. He conceptualized in his book CSR as obligation “the obligations of business to pursue those policies, to make those decisions or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society” (Carroll, 2008, p. 25). The publication of Bowen marked the modern era as described by Caroll and this era was reffered to be Social Responsibility era rather than Corporate social responsibility .Bowen Defined Social responsibility as: ‘’It refers to the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society”(p. 6). The evolution of CSR has continued over the year when the focus on CSR initiatives was the main strategy for the academics and the businesses. The role of stakeholders has increased in this period to attempt the importance in the CSR debate due to support pf academic leaders such as as Peter Drucker .He believed that while management’s role is to make profit he believed that it is much important that they consider the consequence and effect of their business on society. (Joyner & Payne 2002, p. 302).In 1957 it was the first time where the concept of CSR was implemented proactively in business with

60). He also argued that there were three important ideas about CSR First idea was the idea of manager who should consider themselves as the interest of the public trustee.The second idea is that the business manager should make a balance of competing claims to the corporate resources .(Carroll, 2008, p. 26). The third idea was known as corporate philanthropy which means that business support the good causes by promoting the business by donation of money or