SUSTAINABILITY AND BUSINESS BEHAVIOUR: THE ROLE OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) means commitment and actions beyond compliance by the integration of social and environmental concerns into companies´ business operation. The actors of economy, especially the companies have a basic role in fulfilling the goal of sustainability. In the threefold system of sustainability those companies would only be successful which are responsible to build social and environmental concerns into their strategy. In the present article we overview the development of CSR, the CSR policy of the European Union and investigate its relation to sustainable development and describe why it can be interpreted as a measure to get closer to sustainability