According to Harvard's Kennedy School of Corporate Responsibility Initiative, "...throughout the industrialized world and in many developing countries there has been a sharp escalation in the social roles corporations are expected to play. Companies ... are under growing pressure to be accountable not only to shareholders, but also to stakeholders such as employees, consumers, suppliers, local communities, policymakers, and society-at-large."
Researching corporate social responsibility can be a challenge. You may locate specific reports or resources that focus solely on the beneficence of a given corporation, but watch out for the author's affiliation to determine bias. To get a more comprehensive and objective picture of a company's behavior it is best to gather a number of articles in one of the Gast Business Libraries article indexes or databases. Another option is to search for a book about a company in the book catalog.
Content in part, attributed to Gene Springs, Rutgers University, and used with permission.
