Rätt klädd? : En studie om klädföretags arbete och kommunikation av CSR

The number of firms adapting the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility is constantly growing. It is no longer enough only to supply your customers with demanded products and services since todays’ customers have an increased awareness and are demanding more transparence when it comes to the manufacturing and responsibility for society. Along with a growing interest in social, ethical and environmental matters, many firms have received critique, consequently forcing them to start taking more responsibility for their activities. The clothing industry was among the first to get critized and therefore early in starting their work with CSR. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how firms in the clothing industry work with CSR today, and also how they choose to communicate this work, both internally and externally. The methodology of the paper is qualitative and aims to deeply investigate four different firms, along with an additional interview with a CSR-consult from one of the leading communication-firms in Sweden. The theoretical foundation includes a frame of reference around CSR and the communication thereof, and also a few relevant theories around CSR and business ethics. After analyzing the empirical material the paper have reached a few conclusions. Firms in the clothing industry tend to focus their CSR-work on the social matters, such as improving the controls of their supplier-chain. Human rights tend to be the most important matter when is comes to corporate responsibility. Another important finding is that personal commitment among the management or the persons responsible for CSR-activities is connected with successful and well-developed CSR- involvement in a firm. The difficult part of working with CSR tends to be how to communicate the work, both at an internal and external level. The internal communication seems to be deficient mainly because the firms’ lack of systems and routines to implement CSR through the whole organization. The external communication is often modest because firms fear critique and is not always certain about how much they really can guarantee