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Corporate social responsibility, values, and cooperation.

Article Excerpt
Abstract Lately, some questions relating to Corporate social responsibility (CSR) have become relevant. The European Commission defines CSR as the enterprises' contribution to sustainable development. In the field of cooperation, there are numerous examples of enterprises very closely engaged in sustainable development that apply very strict ethical codes to their regular operations. This work tries to think about: (1) the necessity of taking upon, again, the moral teachings of some fathers of economics as Adam Smith or Robert Owen, most of which were scorned since the triumph of utilitarianism and rationalism; (2) the slide of society through post-modern values; and (3) the role of cooperative principles and values in the new cultural environments.

Keywords Corporate social responsibility * Values * Cooperation

JEL M14 * P13

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the ethical and legal compromises and duties of the enterprise with their groups of interest. These compromises and duties come from the impacts of the enterprise's activity over the social, labour, environmental, and human rights ambits (de la Cuesta and Valor 2003, p. 7).

This idea of entrepreneurial activity is in the centre of a "New Entrepreneurial Culture" (Bestraten and Pujol 2004, p. 6), and it is related to the medium and long term vision of business; the ethics in all the ambits of enterprise; the consideration of people as the enterprise's most precious asset; and the necessity of innovation and evolution in all fields of entrepreneurial activity. So, it is a concept related to the voluntary integration of social and environmental matters in business administration.

The growing interest in this field has resulted in an increased production of papers and regulations by national and international organisations and institutions (European Commission, UN, OECD, ILO) and some rules, such as AA-1000 (Institute of Social Ethical Accountability) and SA-8000 (Council of Economic Priorities). We can even find some rating international agencies on CSR and indexes devoted to the valuing of the social responsibility of stock market floating enterprises, such as FSTE4Good and Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI).

This interest in CSR began to grow in the middle 1990s due to the consumer's fall in trust in enterprises. Some environmental and financial scandals caused this fall in trust and made it evident that human values are moving towards post-materialism. This new human values area is associated with solidarity, quality of life, and consideration of the environment. Corporations begin to take into consideration that growing consumers groups demand not only quality in products or services but also demand certainty that the productive process is organised following some ethical standards. We will analyse these processes of change in the second section.

Even though CSR is becoming very popular, the idea of CSR is not a new one. Adam Smith touched on what must be an ethical trader's behaviour. On the other hand, Robert Owen, one of cooperation's founders is also a founder of CSR. Cooperation and CSR have come from the same sources, and they have many common elements. This will be discussed in the...