Modern Corporate Responsibility
How to Benefit Your Business and Motivate Your
Kathryn Reay is a freelance business
consultant based in London, UK.
Having worked for a number of years
within the charity and educational
sectors as a project coordinator,
she made the move to corporate
responsibility (CR) in 2009, overseeing
the community engagement activity
for a large educational business in
London, eventually creating a wider
CR function. Since then, she has
supported businesses with CR as well
as project management and process
improvement.
Kathryn believes that CR should be
part of how a business goes about
its day-to-day operations and has a
particular passion for assisting small
businesses in becoming more ethical
and sustainable in their approach.
In addition to her consultancy
business, Kathryn also provides
personal development training to both
individuals and groups and is a keen
blogger and writer.
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People Through Ethical Business Practices
Kathryn Reay
Abstract: They say charity begins at home, and this is
certainly the case with corporate responsibility. Think
about it—how can a business say they are an ethical
business that looks after the environment, supports
­local charities, and cares about their customers if they
don’t show how they look after their own staff? And as
Richard Branson says, “Look after your staff and your
staff will look after your customers.” In this article, we
will look at how businesses big and small can transcend
the traditional stereotypes of social responsibility and
instead create a truly ethical business with a focus on
making money while reducing their negative impact
and increasing their positive impact on the world, their
staff, and society.
Keywords: corporate responsibility, CSR, ethics, social
responsibility, staff engagement, sustainability
Introduction
Heart of the city refers to corporate responsibility (CR) as
A process through which companies choose to
take responsibility for their actions and e
­ ncourage
positive impacts through their activities on the
­environment, consumers, employees, ­shareholders,
communities, and all other members of the public
who may also be considered as stakeholders (Heart
of the City 2018).
In 2009, when I first started working in CR, I confess
it was not a term I had previously come across. Outside
of the City of London this wasn’t a common term in the
United Kingdom. Philanthropy was more common and
seemed reserved for the most powerful of businesses
and individuals. And while philanthropy is an important
part of CR, it is by no means the focus and neither is CR
reserved for large corporations.
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 Modern Corporate Responsibility
I soon learned that being charitable was
only part of the equation along with care
for the environment, your community,
and your staff. I now use the term corporate
responsibility (CR) as a catch-all to incubus all
of these areas and any other areas where a
business may choose to operate responsibly.
You may also see it referred to as CSR (cor-
porate social responsibility), sustainability,
ethical business, or responsible business.
In this article, we will look at how busi-
nesses big and small can transcend the
traditional stereotypes of social respon-
sibility and instead create a truly ethical
business with a focus on making money
while reducing their negative impact and
increasing their positive impact on the
world, their staff, and society.
To simplify:
Philanthropy = spending some of your
profits on charity.
CR = operating your business in such
a way that your profit is gained
through ethical means and any
negative impact is minimized.
This means that CR is a day-to-day part of
business. It should run as a thread through
all other functions within a business rather
than standing alone.
This is true regardless of the business
size. All businesses have both a positive
and a negative impact on the world and CR
is about taking a systemic view on how to
tip the balance in favor of the positive.
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Business in the community (BITC), a
­business-led charity with more than 30 years’
experience of mobilizing business to be
more ethical and socially responsible, says,
­“Responsible business is about how a busi-
ness makes its money, not just how it spends
its profit.” (Business in the Community 2018)
I define it as, “How you make your money
while reducing your negative impact and
increasing your positive impact on the
world, your staff, and society.”
For the purposes of this article, I am
going to use four key areas of CR which
are commonly used. As previously men-
tioned, CR should be a thread which runs
through all business areas so that I find it
useful to think of it as a matrix with people,
environment, community, and marketplace
­(sometimes referred to as product) interact-
ing with every business area from finance to
marketing and so on.
You will also start to see as we progress
that there is some interaction between the
four areas of CR as well. For example, what
starts as a “community” initiative may also
benefit employee well-being and engage-
ment (“people”) and may also link with
“marketplace” as it may become a useful
marketing tool.
Because corporate responsibility is
linked to so many areas of business, the CR
function may be based within the human
resources, business development, or mar-
keting departments of an organization
or may even be a separate unit reporting
directly to the CEO or the board of directors.
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 Modern Corporate Responsibility
Depending on the business size, the CR
team may be as small as one person or for
larger businesses may be a team of people
including a number of roles specific to the
business as well as more general CR staff
looking after things such as staff engage-
ment and running the volunteer program.
It is also common to work with specialist
consultants or businesses, for example, in
the area of carbon reduction. A business
will also usually have a number of external
partners, such as charities or community
organizations and may work with special-
ists in their field, for example, responsible
travel. The CR function is often supported
by a team of CR “champions” across the
business.
The direction and effectiveness of the
CR function will often be determined by
where it is positioned in the business, the
buy in and active support or otherwise of
the CEO and management team, and how
effectively the ideals within the CR strategy
are embedded in the overall businesses.
The Evolution of Corporate
Responsibility
Before jumping into the details of what
would be included in each areas of CR
and how this can be applied in practice,
I thought it would be interesting to take
a brief step back and look at how CR has
evolved and where it came from.
Corporate responsibility can be traced
in one form or other back to the 1920s
although its modern definition stems
from the publication of the book Social
Responsibility of the  Businessman in 1953
by Howard R. Bowen, which introduced
the idea that the largest businesses had  a
decision-making power which touched
the lives of citizens in many ways and had
some level of responsibility toward society.
The term, however, came into more
common use in the 1960s after the term
stakeholder was coined. Corporate social
responsibility, as it was most commonly
referred to then, was considered to be a
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business’s obligation to its stakeholders. At
this time, CR focused mainly around phi-
lanthropy; however, the definition of CR
began to be formalized and Keith Davies,
a prominent CR writer of the time, defined
it in 1960 as “businessmen’s decisions and
actions taken for reasons at least partly
beyond the firm’s direct economic and
technical interests.”
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, busi-
nessmen and academics continued to
define and redefine the definition of corpo-
rate responsibility. Many people struggled
with a definition of a business’s responsi-
bility which omitted the business’s primary
responsibility to its shareholders to pro-
duce profits. This eventually evolved into a
focus more on stakeholders which included
shareholders as well as other stakeholders
such as staff and customers, and took
thinking on CR closer to the approach used
today. In 1882, “Business in the Commu-
nity” was created in the United Kingdom
by a group of businesses wishing to be
more active in their communities. Today,
it includes over 50 percent of the FTSE 100.
It was in the 1990s that the concept of CR
broadened from community involvement
to a concern for socially responsible prod-
ucts, processes, and employee relations. In
1992, a not-for-profit called “Businesses for
Social Responsibility” was created which
expanded the definition of CR further.
Since then interest in CR has grown, and
CR has become more of a profession and
recognized area of business. This was high-
lighted in 2001 with the release of guidelines
in social responsibility by the “Organisa-
tion for Economic Cooperation and Devel-
opment” and again more recently in 2014
by the launch of the “Institute of Corpo-
rate Responsibility and Sustainability”,
the United Kingdom’s professional body
for CR and sustainability. CR has become
commonplace in larger businesses, an inte-
gral part of many organizations’ marketing
campaigns, and is expected both by cus-
tomers and potential employees.
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