Corporate Social Responsibility
Lecture 1: Introduction to CSR and Sustainability – Bernd Hendriksen
Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4
Trends in sustainability: Moving from:
• Company towards supply chain
• Environment towards human
• Check the box towards making-an-impact
• Top-down toward bottom-up
• Nice-to-have towards need-to-have
• CSR director towards CFO
Purpose: ‘’If you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people’’.
The quest for purpose (Benoit Leleux):
• In search of the why
• Sustainability as a source of purpose: talent attraction and retention
• Purpose statement formulation:
➢ Interface: zero
➢ Tony’s Chocolonely’s slave-free chocolate
➢ Q: any other examples?
New sustainable enterprises:
,Why do firms care about sustainability? (Bernd Hendriksen)
• Increasing revenues
• Reputation / public trust
• Attracting talent
• Saving costs / bonus
The corporate social responsibility hierarchy (Archie Carrol, Chandler)
• Economic responsibility: to produce an acceptable return for investors (Unilever)
• Legal responsibility: to act within the framework of laws and regulations drawn up by
the government and judiciary
• Ethical responsibility: to do no harm to its stakeholders and within its operating
environment
• Discretionary responsibility: companies have more pro-active, strategic behaviors that
benefit themselves or society, or both (Unilever soap in rural India, Tony Chocolonely,
Tiny House Heijmans, van Oord, etc)
Archetypes (B. Leleux and J. van der Kaaij)
Some examples:
,Materiality Assessment:
• Sustainability is a broad concept involving many different issues
• A materiality assessment helps to identify and prioritise the sustainability issues that
matter most to a business, and her stakeholders – such as consumers, customers
(retailers), and employees – and they expected the business to act upon.
• Identifying these issues helps to keep business alert to stakeholder concerns and
expectations, as well as to issues it believes presents the greatest risks and opportunities
for the business.
Prioritizing among stakeholders:
, Materiality assessment matrix: