Corporate Citizenship - CC

Corporate Citizenship - CC 

definition          The extent to which businesses are socially responsible for meeting legal, ethical and economic responsibilities placed on them by shareholders. The aim is for businesses to create higher standards of living and quality of life in the communities in which they operate, while still preserving profitability for stakeholders.

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discussion        “Corporate citizenship … has emerged as a prominent term in the management literature dealing with the social role of business''. ''This occurred, first of all, in the realm of management practice; having originated in US businesses in the 1980s (Altman & Vidaver-Cohen, 2000), it has since begun to enter the language of the global business community. A landmark in this process has been the joint statement on “Global Corporate Citizenship – The Leadership Challenge for CEOs and Boards”, signed during the World Economic Forum in New York in January 2002 by CEOs from 34 of the world biggest multinational corporations (MNCs), including Coca-Cola Company, Deutsche Bank, Diageo, Merck & Co., McDonald’s Corporation, Philips and UBS (World Economic Forum, 2002)” (Matten and Crane 2003:2)

“Although most of the corporate social responsibility literature stresses these public-relations or market-oriented factors, during the last few years the role of business associations within the framework of development agendas has gained currency. International development institutions such as the UNDP, the World Bank, and the IDB have convened forums, supported projects, and advocated strategies for promoting collaboration between `civil society' and private business. The lexicon of corporate social responsibility has morphed into `corporate citizenship', as new public ^ private associations representing business interests redraw the boundaries among the state, market, and civil society. Latin America has received a significant portion of World Bank attention in this regard.

In a 1999 study called ‘Working together for a change: government, civic, and business partnerships for poverty reduction in Latin America and the Caribbean’ (Fiszbein and Lowden, 1999), the World Bank argues that business associations have a special role: although they represent the private sector, they are also part of the vaunted arena of civic organizations that can fill the void created by the reduction of the state and the failures or limitations of the market. For the World Bank, these foundations are the key civic actors, the channels through which the creation of `social capital' might move from the microlevel to the macrolevel.” (Oglesby 2004:555-556).