Business 6 (1) · Section 3

responsible business, and indeed any responsible member of society, must act with due concern for the effects on the lives of other people. In this sense, social responsibility is broader than legal responsibility of business. Legal responsibility may be fulfilled by mere compliance with the law. Social responsibility is more than that.

It is a firm’s recognition of social obligations even though not covered by law, along with the obligations laid down by law. In other words, social responsibility involves an element of voluntary action on the part of business people for the benefit of society. . NEED FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY What is the right thing to do when it comes to social responsibility?

Should a business enterprise be run for the benefit of its owners who may desire to get as much profit as is possible or else, it needs to be responsible for serving the interest of other sections of society such as customers, employees, suppliers, government and community? The very concept of social responsibility implies that it is essentially an ethical issue, since it involves the question of what is morally right or wrong in relation to the firm’s responsibilities. Social responsibility also has an element of voluntary action on the part of the business person who may feel free to perform or not to perform such responsibilities. They may also exercise their freedom for deciding the extent to which they would like to serve various sections of society.

In fact, all business people do not feel equally responsible towards society. There has been a debate, for some time now whether business should assume social responsibilities or not. Some people strongly believe that a firm’s only social Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Whereas it is the responsibility of every form of business enterprise — be it sole proprietorship, partnership, joint Hindu family, cooperative, or a joint stock company to act in a socially desirable manner, the concept of CSR, used particularly with reference to a company, has recently gained popularity. Corporate social responsibility can be defined as achieving commercial success in ways that honour ethical values and respect people, communities and the natural environment.

CSR means addressing the legal, ethical, commercial and other expectations that society has from corporates who should take decisions and actions that fairly balance the claims of all the stakeholders (i.e., the people who have interest in the life of a corporate including shareholders, creditors, consumers, competitors, workers, government and society at large) CSR is viewed as a comprehensive set of policies, practices and programmes that are integrated into business operations, supply claims and decision making process throughout the company — wherever the company does business — and includes responsibility for current and past actions as well as future impact.