Corporate Social Responsibility - how far should a company go?

Roderick White

WARC Hot Topics are the essential guide to debates in and around marketing. This paper provides an overview of CSR, its proponents and critics, and the challenges of measuring CSR initiatives' and their impact on the bottom line.

Corporate Social Responsibility - how far should it go?

November 2003
Opinions about CSR

Opinions about CSR

There are two polarised views about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The first is that anything taking managements eye off providing shareholder returns is a wasteful and damaging irrelevance. The second, in contrast, is that any company that does not practise CSR deserves all the criticism, boycotts and eventual loss of business it will get.

Between these two, there is a real question: how far should a forward-looking company go to fulfil its (usually unspecified) obligations to society, and how should it go about...

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