The concept and evolution of corporate social responsibility

Abstract

Today socially responsible behavior has become an integral element of biggest corporations both in Russia and abroad. Business can get benefits from social programs and projects by improving its reputation, strengthening relations with authorities, counter-agents and global community. Concrete benefits from using social responsibility are tax and customs preferences, improvement of finance accounting, shaping the loyal customer base, emergence of new counter-agents and devotion of personnel. And especially important is the fact that corporation gets higher stability in crisis periods. Specific features of corporate social responsibility development are plurality and not uniform interpretation, the absence of any opportunity to define key factors influencing its essence. The article provides principle concepts of corporate social responsibility: the theory of corporate egoism, the theory of corporate altruism and the theory of reasonable egoism. The authors distinguish stages of corporate social responsibility development and characterize specificity of corporate social responsibility in Russia. Apart from that they provide comparative analysis of Russian and European practices of corporate social responsibility. It was pointed out that in our country the institute of corporate social responsibility is undergoing its development stage and state acts as a driver of the institute of corporate social responsibility development. It was pointed out that implementation of measures aimed at the development of non-finance accounting and real efficiency of corporate social responsibility in the country will depend on state.