Corporate social responsibility as a challenge for Czech companies

Abstract

The term „Corporate social responsibility“ is an umbrella term embracing theories and practises relating to how business manages its relationship with society. In the last decades the development of companies responsible behaviour has been influenced by several facts. One of them is the existence of multinational enterprises. They have an elaborated firm strategy, a value system and bring the CSR concept in partial divisions. CSR enterprises also take the advantage of differentiation from the competitors and want to be successful on unified markets. Generally there is an effort to improve unfavourable situation in the environment and the society (global warming, corruption, insufficient community support, bad working conditions). The corporate responsibility has been supported by many foundation projects in the Czech Republic, e.g. two month’s employment support campaign “JSOU ZDRAVÍ?” for disabled people (NFOZP) created by the foundation Nadační fond. Czech firms have a possibility to use several portals like educating portal Boussole CSR, its aim is to approximate the responsible business mostly to small and medium sized enterprises. Currently there exist many publications regarding this topic and the companies have a big chance to get into customers’ awareness as a corporate responsible firm, like the attendance at national/international competitions. However, the firms are using other possibilities too. They participate on project creation (e.g. „Stáže manažerů bez bariér“), they establish a fair-trade stand directly in their companies or try to add an value to their business (cleaning company with a respect to the environment).

Keywords

• corporate social responsibility
• social firms
• Czech business environment