Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – How Green Is Green
A Short Introductory Course to CSR
How Green Can Green Get
The result of putting these environmental concerns into marketing campaigns soon becomes clear. Where one retail environment replaces plastic packaging with paper packaging, another retail establishment will feel compelled to transition to paper packaging, along with, perhaps, investing in solar panels for a more efficient use of energy. IKEA in Spain has installed shade cover in a number of its car parks as a convenience to shoppers to protect their motor vehicles from the hot Mediterranean sun. Each one of these shades is in fact solar cell bank generating electric power as it works to protect cars. The offset in energy costs may be significant over time. The beneficial customer goodwill however is immediate. This, in turn, also becomes a selling point to the community. As enterprises turn more and more green, through safe competition, the environment is improved at an accelerated rate… hopefully exceeding the exponential damage incurred prior to CSR considerations. By using the inherent component of competition in free enterprise, the aims of CSR may be better served.
At its most basic level, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is business ethics: fair hiring practices, complying with Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, responsible advertising, and the like. CSR takes it one step farther and addresses the corporation’s interactions within the larger society, as well as other businesses, both local and global.
This more inclusive application of business ethics considers the effects that the business has on stakeholders outside the business itself. Thoreau said “No man is an island,” and the same could be said of businesses. Every business has some sort of rapport with customers, business associates and vendors.
These standards are not written in stone, but could as easily be called “corporate consideration.” CSR is a concept that makes a large corporation take on a more personal face, one that cares about other people, competition, and the planet. As the circle widens, one has to consider the future applications of CSR as well. In this era of space exploration, CSR will continue to be a standard to which businesses, countries and continents deal with each other in these territories. For instance, building a space station in cooperation with other countries is an endeavour that has already made demands of CSR ideologies. The bottom line assumes that it is within every nation’s right to (literally) share space. CSR maintains the delicate balance between private interest and basic human rights. CSR permits joint endeavours to exist, for the benefit of humanity, without the ends justifying the means.