Corporate Social Responsibility in Enron

Introduction

The issue of Corporate Social Responsibility is a major issue that is shifting up the priority ladder into many high level policy discussions and agendas of major corporations. The formal description of the term Corporate Social Responsibility has gone through many changes and transformation over a period of time and it is yet still developing simultaneously along with the needs, outlooks and expectations of society. Up to today, there is no actual standardized description of the term Corporate Social Responsibility and neither is there a general consensus on a clear cut group of situation and issues that the term caters to.

It is definitively agreed upon that the term Corporate Social Responsibility is not organizational philanthropy and neither is it compliance that is in extreme strict inclination with the law. However we can quite adequately isolate the happenings or events that do not fit into the CSR description. The biggest enterprise shocker in the last decade has been the collapse of the Energy giant Enron Corporation. It was such a shell shock that it left thousands of employees in a dire state of compromise and they were completely clueless o the status of their pension funds.

The idea of Corporate Social Responsibility is underlined by the concept that all major corporations can no longer act as separated financial entities that are carrying out their operation in complete isolated from the wider society. The traditional views of survival, profitability and competition are being done away with slowly. The escalating negative and all pervading hit of global entities in major aspects of social life and in the society as a whole has a has been the speedy catalyst in the resurfacing of a wide array of stakeholders that demand accounting about the effect of activity in the complete feel of its effect.

Discussion

An instance of Corporate Social Irresponsibility

Enron till today serves to provide a great example of the problems associated with achieving immense amount of large scale success in a significant short span of time (Enron, 2003). Enron began dealing in the gas commodities in the early part of 1989 and within a few years of establishing its presence in the market, it became one of the biggest gas commodities trading entities in the US with employee strength of over 20000 employees and a global presence in over 40 nations of the world.

Unfortunately after the initial phase of success, Enron then started taking the wrong step by making unnecessary and often disastrous financial associations with other entities that completely shifted the company from its main industry focus and activity that was the energy sector.

Enron started dealing in thus diverse areas of focus such as space merchandising, water, paper, steel, derivative instruments on weather, pc bandwidth, space advertising, credit risk and other industries. The company Enron believed that any item could be converted into a financial product that could be marketed.

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