Corporate Social Responsibility

Paper instructions:

This essay will define corporate social responsibility, how it can help international business, help societies, how the interests of business and society can conflict and how it can be solved.To better understand CSR, this essay will try to explain the concept through a combination of frameworks and theories. Firstly, Crane, Matten, and Spence (2014)lists six core characteristics of corporate social responsibility, which are voluntary, managing externalities or repercussions of unaccounted economic activity which affects other parties, multiple stakeholder-oriented, alignment of social and economic responsibilities, practices and values, and beyond philanthropy. Therefore, a definition of corporate social responsibility that contain the main ideas of the core characteristics maybe considered a valid definition. A definition of corporate social responsibility by Jones (1980) defines corporate social responsibility as the concept of firms having obligations toward constituent societal groups outside of stockholders, or those as obligated by the law or union contract, where the obligation must be of a firm’s own volition and not affected by coercive parties, and that the obligations are broad and extends to others in society such as customers, nearby communities, and staff. This definition encompasses the core characteristics of being voluntary, multiple stakeholder-oriented, managing externalities, and alignment of social economic responsibilities.