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President Trichet, Ladies and Gentlemen,
What in the early times of capitalism was philanthropy has become one of the most important issues of modern corporate culture: Corporate social responsibility - the way firms interact with the social environment around them and show their commitment to local communities.
While CSR does not have a universal definition, many see it as the private sector’s way of integrating the economic, social, and environmental imperatives of their activities. As such, CSR closely resembles the business pursuit of sustainable development and the triple bottom line. In addition to integration into corporate structures and processes, CSR also frequently involves creating innovative and proactive solutions to societal and environmental challenges, as well as collaborating with both internal and external stakeholders to improve CSR performance.
The sensibility to those topics has increased at unprecedented speed in the last few years. At the World Summit on sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002 everybody agreed that partnership between business, government and civil society is the key to the progress if we really want a sustainable global economy. These kinds of events tend to be successful. Much more difficult is the implementation of such recommendations.
Many say that “the ethical consumer will drive change." But one cannot forget that most surveys show that consumers are more concerned about things like price, taste, or sell-by date than ethics, one has only to think of the success of price/cost driven companies such as “Wal-Mart”. Wishful thinking is full of predictions like “There will be a competitive race to the top over ethics amongst businesses”, but one should also remember that while CSR efforts often offer good PR, which companies of course like,
in some cases businesses may be able to capitalize on well-intentioned efforts, say by signing the U.N. Global Compact without necessarily having to actually change their behaviour.
ICCA is a cultural institution and is a part of a more global and articulated discussion, where business leaders, politicians, representatives of international organizations and social scientists cooperate not only to enlarge the common basis for a shared definition of CSR, but also to enlarge the concrete application of such a vision. ICCA has authored and edited the world’s first encyclopaedia of CSR, The A to Z of CSR. This book will be officially launched this November at an event entitled A global economy Without Global Standards? At this event over one hundred experts from around the world will discuss some of the most intriguing and dramatic questions connected with globalisation and CSR: does the global economy require worldwide governance, environmental or human rights standards? This is the continuation of a previous work the best selling ICCA Handbook on CSR, a publication which, for the first time, enabled the world’s leading CEOs to bring their personal experience and insights to light.
Nevertheless, I think that Corporate Social Responsibility is a too serious matter to be left just to such prestigious institutions. Only thanks to a truly global dialogue between firms, entrepreneurs, cultural and economic institutions and academics, can a common culture and an effective practice of Corporate Social Responsibility grow.
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