Corporate social responsibility between public policy and enterprise policy,” Transfer

In spite of – or maybe precisely because of – its inherent vagueness, ambiguity and multidimen-sionality, CSR has increasingly come into vogue with the EU institutions, national governments and numerous European companies. This article identifies four types of CSR approaches: (1) CSR between business and society (e.g. the US approach); (2) CSR in business (e.g. HRM with-in firms); (3) CSR between business and government (e.g. the European Commission’s approach) and (4) CSR between employment policy and business (e.g. the Danish approach). Denmark, which provides the case study of the article, typifies an approach to CSR in which the government and social partners have played an active role in promoting CSR and where initia-tives have focused narrowly on employers ’ responsibilities for the recruitment, training, develop-ment and dismissal of labour. The Danish case thus allows for a discussion of the role of public authorities and social partners in CSR, a discussion often neglected in mainstream CSR litera-ture. The main question addressed in the article is how links can be created between policy instru-ments and business interests in order to reduce workplace exclusion and promote the labour mar-ket integration of the unemployed and inactive. We propose a framework that transcends the dichotomy between voluntarism and coercion that characterises much of the CSR discussion b