Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a field that has continued to reshape our
world. What does this mean is perhaps an understandable question a newcomer to
the field of CSR might want to ask. Corporations and stakeholders of this era have
fully understood that our past ignorance in dealing appropriately with certain issues
has been responsible for many of today’s social, economic and environmental
challenges that we have had to live and deal with. Embedding CSR into corporate
strategies should hopefully ensure that corporate entities and their stakeholders
would be encouraged to behave responsibly and act ethically at all times, this would
make our world a better world for all inhabitants of planet Earth.
Being socially responsible is actually everybody’s business. It is not just only
corporations or big businesses that should be responsible. In any event small- and
medium-sized enterprises are by far the largest employers of labour worldwide, so
they impact more on our world than big corporations. Many of the CSR related
issues which affect all companies touch on human rights, bribery and corruption,
carbon emissions, child labour, pollution, discrimination, terrorism and several
other issues which affect us all either directly or indirectly. That is why CSR is
everybody’s business. Not only that, we are also stakeholders in one form or
another to all corporate entities of this era, we are therefore charged with ensuring
that these entities behave responsibly and do the right things at all times, that is
another reason why CSR is everybody’s business. Corporate social responsibility
will continue to throw more light into things we should and should not do as we
continue to advance our knowledge about the social and environmental consequences of our actions and inactions, this can only happen through research, debate,
corporate accountability and transparency towards corporate stakeholders and the
civil society. We have an open forum to do this and one hopes that this is a general
understanding worldwide.
The issue of weak and inappropriate corporate governance has caused a series of
unimaginable problems and made life much more difficult for everybody globally.
The mysteries caused by the 2008 global financial crisis are still as fresh in
everybody’s mind as if it happened yesterday. Without being too rhetorical, this
will continue to be the case for a very long time; many countries are either still
feeling the impact or just coming out of the problems it caused them. Governance
issues have been understood worldwide as being important which perhaps explains
why nearly all countries around the world today have put in place some sort of
corporate governance codes for companies to either comply with or explain why
they have not complied with these codes. A good system of governance is a
precursor to running a successful and sustainable business, which is at least our
understanding of the state of play in the twenty-first century.
This book has addressed many dimensions of CSR and Governance that are
important to corporate entities in different economies of the world. It has been
fortunate in its ability to have attracted interests from respectable scholars and
philosophers of repute from Europe, North America, Australia and Africa. It is
therefore hoped that the information it contains will be useful to our readers from
any sector of society, for example education, industry and commerce, practitioners,
international organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations and
those who are concerned about the adverse impacts of corporate activities on
mankind, the environment and also the future of our planet.