Corporate Social Responsibility

Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,0, University of Linz (Institut für Internationales Management), language: English, abstract: Today, ethics gain more and more importance in our economy and the often-heard statement ¿Global capitalism, local values¿ underlines the trend to make money with the help of local values. From that aspect, capitalism does not seem to appear that ignoring and barbarous but shows us that in deed that human values and ethical standards are anchored in the acting of huge, successful multinational concerns. The role of values in that case is crucial as they affect our everyday life. Everything we do and the way we think is guided by values which we got communicated from our families, people that seem to be important for us or from institutions that accompanied us for a period of our life. Values and behaviour are some kind of indicators that form generations and decades.When talking about values and ethics, the upcoming importance of corporate socially responsible behaviour in form of CSR projects can not be disregarded. It is definitively the buzzword of the early 21st business century. Nearly every huge company has to face corporate social responsibility activities in order to behave in a way its customers and society in general want them to. So the role of external pressure should not be underestimated. A good example is McDonald¿s. The 40 billion US-dollar concern continuously implements CSR programs but does not behave in a socially responsible way when talking about the firm¿s employees and working conditions. Work at Mc Donald¿s is low-skilled, hard and most of the time unrelenting, as one of the company mottos suggests: ¿¿ if there is time to lean there is time to clean¿ (Royle, 2005, p.45). Bad working conditions like underpayment and endless night shifts make Mc Donald¿s to appear in another light in the minds of its employees and customers, after the motto ¿We sold them a dream and paid them as little as possible¿. If participating companies mean these activities really serious is often doubtful. Also the question if these activities really fit to the corporate culture of the organization stays unanswered. So organizations implement projects like that in order to be legitimated by society, but when we take a look behind the organization¿s curtain, it can be recognized that the CSR activity is only a facade of legitimating.