CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Topic
The concept of corporate social responsibility (hereinafter referred to as CSR) was first introduced by Oliver Sheldon in 1924.
CSR policy basically means that businesses should embrace responsibility for the impact of their activities on their communities, environment, consumers, employees, and all the other members of the public.
As early as in the 1930s, renowned economic professors Adolf Berle and E. Merrick Dodd had already led a spirited debate on the issue of whether corporations should undertake social responsibilities.
In terms of issues such as the company's functionality and role, and of the trustee of the manager, Berle (1931) regarded companies as sheer for-profit economic organizations in which all the corporate powers belonged to stockholders. By contrast, Dodd (1932) advocated that companies should embrace social responsibilities since companies were greatly influenced by public interests when allocating private properties. Thus, companies should be considered organizations endowed with both functions of seeking profits and serving society. The debate lasted for more than two decades and ended with Dodd's standpoint prevailing over Berle’s.
Thus, CSR policy has been conventional since its introduction.
By the late 1990s, the idea of CSR had become almost universally sanctioned and promoted by all constituents in society from governments and corporations to non-governmental organizations and individual consumers. Most of the major international organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development and International Labor Organization have not only endorsed CSR, but also established guidelines and permanently staffed divisions to research and promote CSR.
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1.2 Definition of Corporate Social Responsibility
The issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been debated since the 1950s. The latest analyses by Secchi (2007) and Lee (2008) reported that the definition of CSR is in a process of change in meaning. According to Berle, the classical view of CSR was narrowly limited to philanthropy and then shifted to the emphasis on business-society relations, particularly referring to the contribution that a corporation or firm made to solving social problems. In the early twentieth century, social performance was tied up with market performance. The pioneer of this view, Oliver Sheldon (2003), however, encouraged management to take the initiative in raising both ethical standards and justice in society through the ethic of economizing, i.e. to economize the use of resources under the name of efficient resource mobilization and usage. By doing so, a business creates wealth in society and provides better standards of living.
According Wood (1991), the present-day corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate conscience, corporate
