Corporate Social Responsibility

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Chapter I: Introduction

1.1 Background

Corporate social responsibility according to Henderson (2001) can be defined as the commitment of organizations to help society by improving working and living conditions of employees, their families, and the community as a whole.

The use of CSR as a discipline has its foundation on past centuries, when some kind of social awareness was practiced by companies at the time, nevertheless most authors concur that from the 1960’s onwards, the developmental pace of the subject increase considerably and it became the real basis in which CSR stands in current times, each of the last five decades has played an important role for the discipline, especially the 1990’s decade when general social discontent had spread through different sectors of society and organizations were demanded to become part of the solution rather than the problem (May et al, 2007).

Many are now the companies that consider themselves to be social responsible, the case of Shell is one that stands out, due to the fact that the company in the 1990 was severely accused to accept and follow wrongful policies of work and had no interest on improving the life conditions of the communities in which operated, like the case of Nigeria .After a restructuration in its guidelines and strategies Shell has now become a devoted social responsible company (Henderson, 2001). Another well behave company is Starbucks coffee, this corporation has developed different levels of social responsibility that stretch from its own employees to the coffee farmers around the world (Starbucks.com, 2009). For both companies the application of a social responsibility framework has had positive outcomes, especially those related to acceptanc...

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...lso describes the secondary data methodology followed by an explanation of the primary data collection process. In addition the instrument, sample size and the data processing and analysis are defined in this section.

Chapter 5 presents the analysis of the data obtained through the primary research as well as the main findings of the study. The descriptive measures as well as the frequencies were employed to analyse the results and draw relevant conclusions. In addition cross-tabulations were used in order to establish possible dependence between variables.

Chapter 6 relates the main finding to the objectives of the research study in order to prove that these were successfully met. The managerial implications of the research are also developed in this section in conjunction with the limitations and the suggestions for future research studies.

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