Social Responsibility of a Business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Social Responsibility of a Business - Essay Example Quite often, businessmen can be found expressing their concerns upon the social responsibilities of business. In the modern age, people have become extremely conscious about the issues of health and safety, and sustainability. Having sufficiently achieved the necessities of life, people, organizations, and agencies all are now heading towards achieving psychological contentment. That is why, issues like sustainable development have become a major concern in the contemporary age unlike past, when bringing the industrial revolution was more important that keeping environment healthy with a compromise upon development of technology. As businesses are the key drivers of economy and the practices adopted by business entrepreneurs play a decisive role in the maintenance of health and safety of the environment, a lot of debate has conventionally occurred regarding the relationship between business and society. This gave rise to the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR had e volved as a concept to define the link between business and society (Klonoski, 1991 cited in Shah and Chen, 2010, p. 118). One of the leading scholars who have conventionally participated heavily in the debate of relationship between business and society is Carroll (1979) who defined the corporate social responsibility in these words, â€Å"The social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point of time† (Carroll, 1979, p. 500). There are six basic responsibilities of the CSR as indicated in the figure below: Responsibilities of CSR (Rotariu and Ilies, 2011, p. 13). Another useful and well constructed definition of CSR is that it is â€Å"a prominent feature of the business and society literature, addressing topics of business ethics, corporate social performance, global corporate citizenship, and stakeholder management† (D’Amato, Henderson, and Florence, 20 09, p. 2). In addition to CSR, another term that has been coined some time ago and that also explains the public concerns with business is public relations (PR). A comprehensive definition of public relations is; â€Å"PR practice is the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organizational leaders, and implementing planned programs of action which will serve both organization and public interest† (Wilcox et al. 2003 cited in Sinh, 2007). According to Grunig (2006 cited in Jones and Bartlett, 2009, p, 1), the biggest difficulty practitioners of public relations encounter is the enrollment of public relations in the business practices as an acknowledged management function. The social dimension of a business: Business in society exists because of Social Will. Society permits business to extract the resources that nature has given it since time immemorial, to market products and to provide necessary services to its members with the least side-effects on existing morality, social relationships, and the environment. (Alweiss, 2009). Social conscience of the business requires the entrepreneurs to provide the public with job opportunities, eradicate discrimination from the workplace on the basis of race, gender, religion and culture etc, and adopt such business practices that make it green, environment friendly and sustainable.