Abstract
This article serves as an introduction to the collection of papers in this monographic issue on “What the European tradition can teach about Corporate Social Responsibility” and presents the rationale and the main hypotheses of the project. We maintain that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an ethical concept, that the demands for socially responsible actions have been around since before the Industrial Revolution and that companies have responded to them, especially in Europe, and that the content of CSR has evolved over time, depending on historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic drivers and particular conditions in different countries and also at different points in time. Therefore, there is not – and probably cannot be – a unique, precise definition of CSR: one global standard for CSR is unlikely.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Professor Brian Husted for his useful comments to a draft of this paper; as usual, he is not responsible of the omissions and mistakes left. Antonio Argandoña acknowledges also the help of the “la Caixa” Chair of Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance of IESE Business School.
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Argandoña, A., von Weltzien Hoivik, H. Corporate Social Responsibility: One Size Does Not Fit All. Collecting Evidence from Europe. J Bus Ethics 89 (Suppl 3), 221–234 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-010-0394-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-010-0394-4