HISTORY OF “CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY” CONCEPT

Nicoleta Farcane, West University of Timişoara, Romania
Eusebiu Bureana, West University of Timişoara, Romania

ABSTRACT: With long-lasting debates, corporate social responsibility concept was from the
beginning a high-interest subject to all of the stakeholders of the companies: shareholders, public
opinion, employees and governments. Based on studies which demonstrates the socially
responsible companies have major financial and image-related benefits, we started researching
the roots of the concept “corporate social responsibility”. By using qualitative method,
hermeneutic perspective, we chose the comprehensive approach of CSR developed by Goodpaster
et al. (2005). We analyzed four sides out of five of the concept (economics contributions of
companies to society, contextual changing of companies’ development and existence environment,
Conceptual evolution and dimentions of CSR, perspective of theories in close connection with
CSR) and we proposed a definition of what we belive is CSR. Analyzing the pros and cons of
accepting the CSR model as stated nowadays, we concluded as follows: Without neglecting the
implicit social responsibility of companies towards others (like human beings) – by means of taxes
and social charges imposed by law, and without fully accepting the extreme opinion that presents
corporations as entities that indirectly hold all the communities’ political, social and economic
power, companies should strictly follow their economic goal, which implicitly fulfils all the
additional requirements imposed to companies by some stakeholders.

KEYWORDS: CSR, corporate social performance, corporate social sensitivity, CSR models

JEL Classification: M14, Q56