Coporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a very familiar term in the modern business world in the last twenty years. Asongu (2007) asserts "While some authors do believe that CSR is a relatively new concept, CSR is perhaps as old as business itself and in some societies one cannot do without being socially responsible". CSR is a concept that has grown in importance, as well as interpretation, and can be referred to by several different names, corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, corporate sustainability, corporate accountability, corporate ethics, sustainability and triple bottom line, just to name a few. This is because CSR does not have a universal definition or a recognized set of criteria and is interpreted differently by each company. This lack of standardization offers a major advantage to corporations as it allows them considerable leg room in adapting and integrating their own policies and values into what CSR means to them. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how and why over the last twenty years CSR has become increasingly important in organizations, and to research and examine what effect CSR has on the oil giant Bp (formally British Petroleum) by outlining what social responsibility truly means to them.

2.0 DEFINITIONS OF CSR

CSR has developed from the concept of corporate governance, which deals with how investors realize profits on their investments and has shifted away from the purely economic factors to include the human factor.

Lilla Veronika Kiss defines CSR as "the way in which a company achieves the integration of economic, environmental and social imperatives to achieve sustainable development, while addressing stakeholder expectations and sustaining shareholder value".

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development defines CSR as "the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large".

One of the most comprehensive definitions of CSR is given by Archie Carroll. Carroll (1979) defines CSR thus; "the social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal ethical and discretionary or philanthropic expectations that society has of business at a given point of time".

The public at large believe that companies