Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) emphasizes that companies need to be accountable not only for the economic results of their activities, but also of the social and environmental results of those activities, which has introduced the concept of “Triple Bottom Line Accounting,” and the idea of a Social Balance Sheet (SBS), or Sustainability Report (SR) which complements the economic performance accountability of the statutory accounts. While such reports are now produced by many companies, and contain much important CSR information regarding also the future sustainability of a company, they sometimes remain of secondary use for the investment analyst, who, in making his share price buy or sell recommendations, tends to concentrate on the hard financial figures, rather than on the softer statements of social mission and results. But this should not detract from the importance and value of the SBS or SR for the economic education of employees and the other stakeholders, including details of the company’s ethics for doing business expressed in a Code of Business Ethics.