Which social responsibility for the enterprise

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a key issue in the global context. The idea is to reshape the focus of companies’ activities by taking account of employees’ and society’s interests. This fashionable label plays a big role in the context of codes of conduct for multinational enterprises as well as for recent strategies EU policies. Long before the invention of the label CSR it has been generally accepted in Germany that enterprises are not supposed to primarily increase the “share holder value” but rather the “stakeholders’ value”, thereby including the employees’ interests. And it even has been assumed that enterprises do have an important function in promoting the well being of the society as a whole: the bigger the company the bigger the duties in this respect. This view is backed by the Constitution and inline with the constitutional doctrine as well as with the interpretation given by the Federal Constitutional Court.