Marketing for Sustainable Development

6The Conditions for Effective Social Communication¹

Agnès FRANÇOIS-LECOMPTE¹ and Sylvie FOUTREL²

¹ LEGO (Laboratoire d’économie et de gestion de l’Ouest), University of South Brittany, Vannes, France

² LEGO (Laboratoire d’économie et de gestion de l’Ouest), Catholic University of West Brittany South, Arradon, France

6.1. Introduction

While the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not new, it seems to have become more and more widespread within the economic fabric in recent years. It refers to the voluntary integration by companies of social and environmental concerns into their commercial activities and their relationships with stakeholders (European Commission Green Paper – July 18, 2001). While CSR refers to a theoretical field that is older and applied more to the business world than sustainable development, the two notions are, in fact, currently used interchangeably without any real distinction (Mauléon and Silva 2009). Within this study, CSR is therefore assimilated into the act of companies taking sustainable development into account. The extensive study carried out by EcoVadis (2019) on 21,000 companies worldwide indicates that the integration of social and environmental criteria has increased year on year: in France, 70% of small and medium-sized enterprises and 75% of large enterprises now have a CSR management system. This movement is partially explained by a regulatory context that obliges large companies to confront these challenges and take them ...