Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, Second Edition

EXTERNAL STANDARDS ON CSR

The ever-increasing interest in CSR has been matched by substantial growth in the number of external standards produced for business by governmental, non-governmental, advocacy organizations, with a view to supporting, measuring and assisting in implementation, and to create a platform for accountability for performance on CSR issues. These external standards developed and evolved over a period of time is found necessary as companies do not have a clear vision and focus about what constitutes CSR, how their investment quantum on it is decided, how to evaluate the outcome and so on. Some of the standards are meant to address single-issue (e.g. focused on environmental performance or corporate governance) while others ...