CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Business ethics which is concerned with ethical principles and problems regarding the global business environment gets more and more attention every day. Pressure directed to the industry by stakeholders, general public and government aiming to improve business ethics application and perception is increasing. Businesses understand the fact that they can only gain short term profit because of unethical behavior and it leads to focusing on business ethics increasingly. Good business ethics is incrementally expanding in the market.Generalizing definitions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) proposed by different authors, we may relatively divide them into three groups and regard CSR as: an obligation required by the law and economics, for a firm to pursue long term goals that are favourable for society; the continuing commitment of business to the ethical behaviour and contribution to economic development, improvement of the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as that of the local community and society at whole; how a company manages its business process to create an overall positive impact on society.Social responsibility can be considered towards different interest groups: owners, investors, employees, suppliers, customers, competitors, government and society.So, the author's view is that CSR tells how companies manage the business processes to produce an overall positive impact on society and other interest groups. Nowadays lots of mechanisms exist for producing positive impact on society. There are several steps that could be taken for providing socially responsible activity: setting of goals; choice of favourable types of activities, choice of non-profit or other organization to cooperate with; design of a program, and it's proposal to the nonprofit group, negotiations about an agreement with the organization, involvement of employees and customers.Social responsibility can no longer be ignored by businesses if they want to operate over the long-term outlook