CSR... Is this the solution?

When we had our session about CSR we also had a guest speaker who presented an overview of CSR. Her names is Zoe Arden and she worked for some important corporations. One of them is BT ( British Telecom). She explained us why CSR is so important nowadays and how it works. She also told us about BT trying to be "green" which personally i found it very interesting. But first i would like to tell you more about CSR.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate conscience, corporate citizenship, social performance, or sustainable responsible business)[1] is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company's actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere. Furthermore, CSR-focused businesses would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality. CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, that is the core business of the company or firm, and the honouring of a triple bottom line: people, planet, profit.

Nowadays companies can buy, invest, produce and sell anywhere on the planet and this fact made the global players to take advantage by exploiting the third world and therefore maximising their profit. But they were not prepared to take social responsiblity for the places they operate in and the gap between rich and poor grew. What were the consequences?Well,one of the most important ones was the environmental damage. Today there are so many debates on this issue. Everyone is trying to save the planet to make it " green" again, but this is quite impossible because corporations are not stopping.If they stop they will lose money and this is the last thing they want. This is why NGOs came to life, naming and shaming some of the world`s biggest companies` racketeering - BP, Nestle and Nike, just to name a few.

NGO's role made corporations to be more interested in this concept of CSR. This is because of the pressure built up by NGO'S.

Now coming back at our session and at our guest speaker. Someone in the class asked her how many people work in a CSR department. Well the answer was 1 in most of the cases. When i heard that i was shocked. How can a single person be in charged with so many responsibilities? So then i thought that CSR is just a tool to pretend that corporations care about environment, that they use it just because nowadays are so many debates regarding the environment and they don't want to stain their reputation. They don't want to lose money, they still want profit but with a clear face. But let's face it. We don't want them to pretend that they will save the world. All we ask is a bit of honesty toward us, the consumers.