How do traditional views understand corporate responsibility?

1, what is corporate social responsibility?

Although the formal definition of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been discussed many times in domestic and foreign forums, it is still inconclusive. At present, the concept of corporate social responsibility is generally recognized internationally: while creating profits and being responsible for the interests of shareholders, enterprises should also bear social responsibilities to employees, society and the environment, including observing business ethics, production safety, occupational health, protecting the legitimate rights and interests of workers, and saving resources.

Although there is no single definition of corporate social responsibility, in essence, enterprises adopting this method need to do three important things:

1), the company recognizes that its business activities will have a significant impact on the society in which it lives; Social development will also affect the company's ability to pursue enterprise success;

2) In response, the company actively manages the economic, social, environmental and human rights impacts brought by its worldwide business activities, which not only brings benefits to the company's business operation and corporate reputation, but also benefits the social groups in the company's region;

3) The company realizes these benefits through close cooperation with other groups and organizations, local groups, society and government departments.

According to corporate social responsibility, companies all over the world are advised to abide by these high standards, regardless of their local economic, political and social conditions.

Related:

The World Bank defines corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a collection of policies and practices related to the relationship between enterprises and major stakeholders, values, law-abiding and respect for people, communities and the environment. Enterprises are committed to contribute to sustainable development in order to improve the quality of life of stakeholders.

Other formulations: the so-called "corporate social responsibility" means that under the market economy system, the responsibility of enterprises should not only pursue profits for shareholders, but also consider the interests of shareholders, that is, the interests of all parties that affect and are affected by corporate behavior. Among them, employee benefits are the most direct and main content of corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is not an innovative concept. This concept was put forward in the 1920s. With the continuous expansion of capital, it triggered a series of social contradictions, such as polarization between the rich and the poor, social poverty, especially labor problems, and labor-capital contradictions.

2. How to fulfill corporate social responsibility?

The focus and difficulty of corporate social responsibility lies in how to implement it, which is also a problem that the public is generally confused about. To implement corporate social responsibility, it must be implemented in corporate governance. An effective corporate governance structure should include the commitment and realization mechanism of corporate social responsibility, which can comprehensively consider the interests of stakeholders when enterprises face decision-making, so that the decision-making behavior conforms to the principle of maximizing the value of corporate stakeholders, and the behavior of enterprises can be expected and controlled. From the perspective of the whole society, only when enterprises have such a corporate governance structure can they form a micro-foundation to realize social responsibility sharing. On this basis, the government can use macro-control means to formulate corresponding public policies and guide enterprises to assume corresponding social responsibilities.

Starting with the system and mechanism of corporate governance, this paper discusses how to realize corporate social responsibility in corporate governance structure.

1), who will bear it?

Let's go back to the question mentioned at the beginning. A banking guest of Hurun Charity Forum said that he did not dare to use depositors' money for charity. This sentence directly points to an important but often unclear question: who should bear the social responsibility of enterprises? Is the operator of the enterprise? Board of directors? Still a shareholder?

From the basic logic of corporate governance, shareholders elect the board of directors and entrust the board of directors to be responsible for corporate affairs. The board of directors is responsible for the decision-making of the company's strategic affairs, and at the same time selects competent managers, and delegates the daily management power to the top management of the company. After that, the directors are responsible for the company, and in the process, they may make some or all decisions that shareholders think cannot safeguard their best interests. In this case, shareholders can exercise their power at the shareholders' meeting and elect a new board of directors that they think can best faithfully safeguard their interests. Logically speaking, shareholders have no direct decision-making power over company affairs, but only entrust this power to the board of directors. The board of directors has the decision-making power and should also bear the corresponding corporate responsibilities. Therefore, the company's social responsibility should be borne by the board of directors, not directly by shareholders.

2), the way of commitment

In 2005, Fortune magazine selected the list of "the most respected companies". In order to compile this ranking, Fortune magazine interviewed more than 65,438+0,000 directors, supervisors and managers of 357 companies around the world through Hay Group, a management consulting company, and asked each interviewee to rate other companies in their industry according to nine criteria. Among these nine standards, one is "Corporate Social Responsibility". The top ten companies in this standard are Tesco, International Paper, Anheuser-Busch, Safeway, United Parcel Service (UPS) and Huihaolin Products and Building Materials Company. By analyzing the practices of these ten companies, the next section discusses what kind of institutions and systems the corporate social responsibility undertaken by the board of directors is generally realized.

3. Corporate social responsibility: a win-win situation for enterprises and society.

Should enterprises assume social responsibility? Some people are indifferent to this. They believe that the first priority of any enterprise is to maximize profits and create economic benefits, so as to realize its social responsibility. As for other social responsibilities of enterprises, do it if you have the ability, and forget it if you don't. Some people in economic management departments also have a vague understanding of this issue, thinking that as long as the profits of all enterprises are maximized, the national interests can be maximized. Some overseas listed companies even say that my shareholders are foreigners and have to bear social responsibilities. Can foreigners agree?

With the further deepening of reform and opening up and the further establishment of market economy, enterprises are becoming independent market players. They are not only commercial subjects in economic activities, but also play an important role in social activities. International and domestic experience shows that the operation and development of enterprises are inevitably influenced and restricted by social factors, and adapting to social development and community construction has become an important factor for the success of modern enterprises.

Recently, the shocking words such as pollution, mine disaster, poisonous vermicelli, poisoned milk powder, Teflon, Sudan red, paraffin oil have appeared frequently, which makes people's voice for "corporate social responsibility" and improving corporate "citizen responsibility" increasingly high. At the Fortune Global Forum held in Beijing in May this year, Wang Zhile, director of the Research Center for Multinational Corporations of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce, said that as far as local companies in China are concerned, most of them have a weak sense of corporate social responsibility and remain at the level of "maximizing the interests of shareholders". Wang Zhile believes that an enterprise will go through three stages of development: pure making money, pursuing scale and "corporate citizenship" period. Today, most enterprises in China are still in the first stage, and some enterprises have entered the second stage.

As an economic entity, the role of an enterprise as an "economic man" determines that it must pursue profits and maximize the value of the enterprise. However, the maximization of enterprise value is not the same as the maximization of profit, but the maximization of enterprise brand, reputation and social image in the process of profit maximization. This requires enterprises to take the initiative to assume corresponding social responsibilities, that is, to change from "economic man" to "social man". Therefore, the role played by enterprises is both an "economic man" and a "social man".

Enterprises come from the society and must also give back to the society, which is the social-enterprise relationship under the new situation. Enterprise benefit is not equal to social benefit, and local benefit is not equal to overall benefit. The life and death, development and elimination of enterprises should be borne by society. More importantly, enterprises are the cells of society. Without social resources, the development of enterprises will become passive water and trees without roots. Without a good environment, it is difficult for enterprises to survive. Therefore, the relationship between enterprises and society is glorious, and the relationship between enterprises and society under the market economy is closer, rather than becoming relatively distant.

In addition, corporate social responsibility awareness is also related to the overall social and economic operating costs. Imagine that if the bus company is only willing to open bus lines at the best time and place, the traffic in the whole city will be paralyzed; If postal enterprises are only willing to do the most profitable city express delivery, those letters and parcels sent to remote mountainous areas may be ignored; If oil companies are only willing to supply high-grade gasoline to Mercedes-Benz cars and have no interest in supplying cheap diesel to farmers, what will society become? If this goes on, there will be many ifs, from which we can clearly see that some enterprises have assumed the necessary social responsibilities, which may affect their own profits, but their services have reduced the economic operation cost of the whole society and served the people. From this perspective, its social benefits are enormous. What's more, these social responsibilities of enterprises have been compensated by society. They either gain the benefits of industry monopoly, or monopolists occupy all the resources belonging to the whole society.

It can be seen that social responsibility is not unprofitable for enterprises, but "millions of profits". At the same time, assuming social responsibility, although the enterprise will pay a certain cost, it will prove its sense of social responsibility to the society and prove that it can put the public interests and the overall interests of society in an important position in its business activities, thus bringing public recognition. Moreover, taking the initiative to assume social responsibility is also an excellent means to show their own strength and produce advertising effect, which can create a good external atmosphere for enterprises. Therefore, enterprises should not only learn how to make money, but also learn how to spend money, that is, take it from society and use it for society. It is a sign of progress and civilization that enterprises take the initiative to assume corresponding responsibilities, so as to win the trust of the people and become bigger and stronger. Therefore, consciously fulfilling social responsibility is not only the objective requirement of society, but also the need of enterprise's own development.

Savoring these ideas carefully is actually not a brand-new creation of the international social responsibility movement. Because, for thousands of years, China's traditional culture has been advocating "being kind to others" and "harmony between man and nature", which actually contains profound social responsibility thoughts. Therefore, in the face of the wave of international social responsibility movement, we should carry forward the essence of China's traditional culture, learn from the advanced experience of the West, and gradually integrate beneficial management concepts into the production and operation of enterprises.

Now the government has put forward the strategic policy of "adhering to people-oriented, establishing a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development concept, and promoting the all-round development of economy, society and people", requiring enterprises to unify the economic and social benefits of production and operation while pursuing maximum profits.

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4. Corporate social responsibility is the bottom line.

Centuries ago, when the people of China were still fighting bravely for their independence, the United States, Britain, Germany and other traditional economic powers created a large number of outstanding enterprises by virtue of their open and developed business environment: Bayer in Germany, DuPont in the United States, Lafarge in France and Nestle in Switzerland. ...

In the process of development and growth for centuries, these multinational companies not only created huge material wealth for the world, but also their advanced enterprise management concepts and perfect corporate social responsibility concepts accumulated over the years have become valuable spiritual wealth in the history of human commerce.

As early as 95 years ago, DuPont established the world's first enterprise safety committee, and 66 years ago put forward the concept that "all injuries can be prevented"; Bayer set up a wastewater treatment committee in 190 1, except for GM's pragmatic attitude of "actions speak louder than words" in fulfilling its social responsibilities; Does NEC company "serve the public or let the public serve you?" Dialectical thinking before the problem; Johnson & Johnson regards corporate responsibility as the business logic of enterprise development.

Moreover, many multinational companies regularly publish corporate social responsibility reports and corporate citizenship reports while publishing annual reports and financial reports, including the annual corporate citizenship reports issued by Pfizer and Bayer in Germany and the Siemens corporate responsibility report issued by Siemens in Germany.

The perfect interpretation of corporate social responsibility by multinational companies has won applause, but it has also been questioned. Some people even use "conspiracy" to describe a series of behaviors of multinational companies, thinking that they can enhance the corporate image of the company by announcing the status of corporate social responsibility to stakeholders, and their propaganda methods for the company are quite clever.

In this regard, multinational companies in China agree that although "business is business" and profit is always the ultimate goal pursued by enterprises, in the final analysis, the development of enterprises is not contradictory to their corresponding social responsibilities.

In many countries, corporate social responsibility is the bottom line for companies to survive. Without such awareness, you may not even qualify for the competition.

Therefore, at this stage, corporate social responsibility is no longer a multiple-choice question, but has become a question that every enterprise that wants long-term sustainable development must answer.

Reference: China Corporate Culture Network