Howard R. Bowen's Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility refers to the responsibilities that a company has towards society. CSR can be described as decision making by a business that is linked to the ethical values and respect for individuals, society and the environment, as well as compliance with legal requirement.

CSR is based on a concept that a company is a citizen of the society in which it exist and operates. The book “Social Responsibilities of the Businessman” by Howard R. Bowen started the discussion of CSR. Bowen defined CSR as “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 objectives and values of our society.”[1] After initial definition a number of definition

They require, “to fully meet their corporate social responsibility, enterprises should have in place a process to integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders, with the aim of:

– maximizing the creation of shared value for their owners/shareholders and for their other stakeholders and society at large;

– identifying, preventing and mitigating their possible adverse impacts.”[4] CSR received its global character during the third major period – from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Protests against companies spread globally and a massive increase in the calls for more political regulation could not be ignored anymore. Some companies immediately changed their behavior by introducing monitoring systems. Additionally, several new forms of regulation for environmental issues were introduced during this period, starting with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

CSR has become a key marketing and branding exercise even beyond controversial industries. [10]

The companies have begun to integrate Corporate Social Responsibility with their company’s strategy. Stock market companies in many countries have begun to publish reports on their corporate social responsibility. These reports have been voluntary and separately issued with annual financial report. CSR reports are also called social and environmental report and sometime are also called sustainability report.

Similar to this GRI (Global Reporting initiative) is a US-based initiative that encourage companies worldwide to issue sustainable reports. GRI promotes the view that to be sustainable business in the long term the business will benefit by giving attention to the environmental and social issues as well as financial issues. GRI is based on measuring three areas of performance sometimes called ‘triple bottom line’.

These are

• Financial performance

• Social benefit and