Social Responsibility - What and For Whom

I was approached by a MBA student last week to explore the research possibility on corporate social responsibility. It is generally acknowledged that social responsibility is referred to the corporate sector. It is how corporate sector communicates with other stakeholders for their philantrophy activities. most of the time we see corporate sector announcing that they have under their corporate social responsibility activities, planted number of trees, donated sum of money to charitable organisations, organised a get together party for orphanages in conjunction with anniversary celebration or during festive season, carried out the cleanliness campaign or initiated an environmental awareness or education or health campaigns. While it is commendable for corporate sector to initiate such good gestures for community at large, they certainly can do more than that, for themselves. The question is have they do good for themselves and have they become good citizenry? The common saying of charity starts from own self is certainly true. The corporate sector has to examine how good they have performed when come to environmental entrepreneurship or disabled friendly or even users friendly. For example, have their manufacturing activities complied with the legal requirement, have their production moving towards Zero-Waste and Zero-Carbon, do they provide a barrier free office for all, are they practicing fair trade policy and others. Unless and until these are done, the critics on corporate sector for being hypocrate will remain.




Social responsibility is not exclusively for the corporate sector, it can be domain for everyone including the informal sector and SME. SME by virtue of their size has always been excluded from CSR discourse. SME as part of the supply chain on production and consumption cannot run away from social responsibility. For example, the welding factory has responsibility of not making excessive noise and disturbance, the laundry owners have to ensure that discharge waste water will not pollute the drain, the tuition centre should have better traffic management to alliveite the congestion, the car workshop operators should have installed grease trap to filter the oil from going into the river, the food outlet owners should have to make sure that rubbish is properly disposed off and even the hawkers should exercise greater caring and loving attitude towards the clients, environment and surrounding. The CSR concept is definitely there for everyone and SME cannot spare from this responsibility.



CSR is effective only if there are carrot and stick for the SME. As many SME is owner operated, many might not see the importance of having an acceptable practise of CSR. Hence, a check and balance mechanisme should be established to either reward the angels or to penalise the evils. For the start, it is always good to encourage and motivate the SME to start first on small, but meaningful SR gestures. Nowadays, business solutions without taking into consideration for green is a mission unaccomplished. For SME growth, if not for survival, Green CSR is not a choice, but a must.