(extracted by PSPR 6202 assignment - The George Washington University Master's in Strategic Public Relations)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is first and foremost an opportunity. It is an opportunity for corporations to turn a potential issue into a leadership position. It is an opportunity for the stakeholders, who can ask for corporate policy change and regulation advancements. It is an opportunity for society as a whole to pursue progress and a more sustainable future.

Markets operate successfully only when they were embedded in communities.[1] To the ethical, moral, rational and economic arguments (Chandler and Werther, 2014) I would therefore add a “systemic-holistic” argument to emphasise the importance of CSR for today’s business.

A system is a physical and functional unit, consisting of several parts interacting (or in functional relation) among them, forming a whole in which every part makes a contribution to a common purpose. The characteristic of a system is the overall balance created among the single parts that constitute it. The deriving holistic approach states that systems function as wholes and their functioning cannot be fully understood solely in terms of their component parts.

Environment, communities, corporations and their subsystems (e.g. employees, shareholders, executives etc.) are all parts of a system: they interact among them and their functioning cannot be fully understood but through a holistic approach. The action of a corporation has effects on the other elements of the system, whose reaction inevitably affects the corporation as well, at least in the medium-long term. A positive, responsible impact of business activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities and all the other elements of the system, has consequent effects on the system as a whole. Being part of the system, corporates share a responsibility with the other elements.

In a stakeholders’ perspective, the systemic - holistic interdependency is particularly evident: while stakeholders depend on firms to get the products and services they need, companies depend on suppliers, customers, employees, and other stakeholders to remain in business. How stakeholders evaluate the firm depends on what the firm does and how it does it.[2]

For what said above, CSR is an incredibly powerful tool for corporations to anticipate potential issues turning them into leadership opportunities through sustainable policies that responsibly affect the system they operate in.

[1] Chandler, D. and Werther, W.B. (2014), Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders, Globalization, and Sustainable Value Creation, SAGE (p. 10)

[2] Ibid. (p. 43)