CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility

Introduction

In 1905 there arose the Rotary movement, which is based on the fact that financially successful people have to contribute to the improvement in the professional sphere and in society. In 1995, the EU's leading companies have formed a so-called Initiative Corporate Social Responsibility-Europe, unites some 50 large corporations. In 1999 the UK was developed by International Standard Account Ability 1000, designed to measure the performance of companies with ethical standpoint, i.e., a kind of social audit. In 2000 at the initiative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created the Global Pact, calling together business and civil society to support nine principles in human rights, labor relations and the environment (Bendell, 2010).

Overseas experience suggests that this approach gives the company an opportunity to listen and respond to the expectations of its customers. This is especially important for companies operating in the fields, causing contradictory society: tobacco and chemical corporations, oil and pharmaceutical companies (Bendell, 2010).

Global Priorities in the Field of Corporate Social Responsibility for Sustainable Development

International Conference on Sustainable Development held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, was a turning point, fixing the new demands of the international community to corporations to improve their social responsibility. It was a powerful impetus to the intensification of studying the role of large companies in solving social problems.

One reason for increasing corporate social responsibility, calling the need to develop and institutionalize the concept of corporate social responsibility is related to globalization, the growing influence of large companies for economic development. Nation-states are gradually losing the ability to generate internal economic and social policies, giving way to multinational corporations. Detrimental to sustainable development of the social and environmental impacts of powerful transnational structures can be averted only by concerted action at international level aimed at the gradual formation of socially-oriented models of their behavior, united by the notion of "corporate citizenship" (Bird, 2008).

The result of these actions was the institutionalization of the concept of social responsibility at the level of individual countries and across the global community. At the level of its most prominent examples are the introduction of the post of minister for corporate social responsibility in the UK, the adoption of Sarbanes-Oxley in the U.S., the calculation of specific indices of sustainable growth, development of codes of conduct, implementation of corporate social responsibility criteria in the evaluation of investment ratings companies use procedures socially responsible investing and screening. International initiatives include: International Business Council for Sustainable Development, bringing more than one hundred largest multinational corporations in the European Business Declaration against social exclusion; Global Compact, developed under the leadership of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, members of which are hundreds of companies, a number of leading trade unions , human rights and environmental organizations, the Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative of the World Economic Forum, etc (ibid).

In June 1769 the potter Josiah Wedgwood opened a new factory, Etruria, near Stoke-on-Trent. This was using the latest technology, based on classical culture and applying the innovative idea ...