Ten things you always wanted to know about CSR (but were afraid to ask) Adrian Henriques begins

a new ten-part series by looking at the historical roots of the movement. Part One: A brief history of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The history of CSR is almost as long as that of companies. Concerns about the excesses of the East India Company were commonly expressed in the seventeenth century. There has been a tradition of benevolent capitalism in the UK for over 150 years. Quakers, such as Barclays and Cadbury, as well as socialists, such as Engels and Morris, experimented with socially responsible and values-based forms of business. And Victorian philanthropy could be said to be responsible for considerable portions of the urban landscape of older town centres today. However, the modern expression of CSR has grown up in the in the last century. It has at least three streams: Philanthropy and community involvement Socially responsible investment Social auditing The philanthropic stream has evolved over the last century from straightforward good works to sophisticated partnership projects, awards and indices such as those championed by Business in the Community. Another approach to this kind of corporate citizenship is that adopted by the London Benchmarking Group, which analyses community involvement by means of categories ranked by the level of altruism involved. The common theme here is that the community is the central stakeholder. Socially responsible investment (SRI) is about the investment of funds according to ethical, social or environmental criteria. From a mainstream corporate perspective, socially responsible investment has always seemed a sideshow. Nevertheless, today in the USA over US$2,000 billion dollars are invested in SRI funds. In the UK about half of the 800 billion in pension funds are run by managers who say they do take social, environmental and ethical considerations into account in making investment decisions. In the 1940s, Theodore Kreps in the USA was arguing for corporate social responsibility. This was picked up in the 1960s by the writer George Goyder in his book The Responsible Company, which introduced the term social audit. The idea of social auditing became, in the 1970s, something which was done to a company by an outside organisation perhaps a hostile union or an environmental campaigning group. It wasnt until the mid-1990s, however, that the term became used in a way which is recognisable today as a systematic appraisal of a companys impact on its stakeholders made by the company and with assurance provided by an independent third party.

Today the landscape of CSR is characterised by three things: Rapid development. One of the features often remarked upon is the profusion of differing, but similar terms such as social auditing, community auditing, community investment, community involvement, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility and others even without addressing the whole issue of sustainability. A second feature is an explosion of codes and standards, all designed to help an organisation towards better social performance, but collectively making any particular commitment to a standard seem arbitrary. The gradual arrival of regulatory support for CSR whether in the form of declarations required from pension funds, the likely new format for company accounts which will need to include social and environmental considerations or the regulatory requirements for consultation for new projects or infrastructure provision. Growing corporate enthusiasm. An ever larger number of companies are producing CSR reports, initiating stakeholder consultations and committing to environmental performance management.

This series of articles has been sponsored by the Construction Industry Environmental Forum (CIEF). Part two follows next month, and looks at the key drivers for the CSR movement.