Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is the act of incorporating environmental and social concerns into

a company’s planning and operations. These programs center around the idea that businesses can make
the world a better place, or at the very least, they can reduce their negative social and environmental
footprint on the world.

People create organizations to leverage their collective resources in pursuit of common goals. As
organizations pursue these goals, they interact with others inside a larger context called society. Based
on their purpose, organizations can be classified as for-profits, governments, or nonprofits. At a
minimum, for-profits seek to make a profit, governments exist to define the rules and structures of
society within which all organizations must operate, and nonprofits (including NGOs—nongovernmental
organizations) emerge to do social good when the political will or the profit motive is insufficient to
address society’s needs. Aggregated across society, each of these different types of organizations
represents a powerful mobilization of resources. In today's socially conscious environment, employees
and customers place a premium on working for and spending their money with businesses that prioritize
CSR.

Although responsible companies had already existed for more than a century before, the term
Corporate Social Responsibility was officially coined in 1953 by American economist Howard Bowen in
his publication Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. As such, Bowen is often referred to as the
father of CSR. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that CSR truly began to take flight in the United States.
In 1971, the concept of the ‘social contract’ between businesses and society was introduced by the
Committee for Economic Development. This contract brought forward the idea that companies function
and exist because of public consent and, therefore, there is an obligation to contribute to the needs of
society. By the 1980s, early CSR continued to evolve as more organizations began incorporating social
interests in their business practices while becoming more responsive to stakeholders. Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) has come a long way, morphing from a nice thing to do to what it is today: a
necessity for a successful business. Today’s CSR programs have their roots in corporate philanthropy.

CSR represents an argument for a firm’s economic interests, where satisfying stakeholder needs
becomes central to retaining societal legitimacy. Ethical, moral, rational, and economic are the
underlying arguments of CSR. There is no question that, ethics is the great foundation of Corporate
Social Responsibility (CSR). Responsibility is by definition, an ethical value that is applied within a
reasonable judgment by a person while fulfilling with dignity all his duties, whether it is students,
professors, workers, businessmen or housekeepers. As a result, Corporate Social Responsibility is
referred to the specific attitude of social responsibility in a corporate and the moral obligation that it has
in order to execute its responsibilities within a society. In other words, the company is viewed here as a
person and, the same as each one of us, it is included within the moral obligations that it should
implement.