Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR has transformed over the last 50 years from a purely voluntary and occasional consideration of not only economic aspects into a fundamental concept of modern business. Business entities in the EU, including the Czech Republic, are increasingly and actively engaging in a multi-stakeholder model of sustainability.
The original UN declaratory resolution and the related international regime with a purely optional impact on business entities are undergoing modification, instead of even transformation, into concepts and strategies beginning to take on mandatory features. Despite this major development, it still has to be stated that the concept of sustainability and its passive or even active promotion, including engagement in the multi-stakeholder model of sustainability and cross-sectoral partnerships, is neither a given nor a conventionally enforceable obligation for the vast majority of EU business actors.
Thus, the decision whether and eventually how a business entity incorporates sustainability, or the concept of sustainability, into its business is largely a discretionary decision of the business entity concerned, often (but not always) based on balancing the costs of sustainability with the potential to gain a competitive advantage. This logically brings the need for in-depth analysis and consideration of a whole range of aspects. Given the relative newness of the matter and also its sometimes revolutionary developments, including interventions of crises of an economic (2007-2009) and or other nature (2020 COVID-19), the relevant methodologies and strategic formulas are still taking shape and it is not only academics who are struggling to come to terms with this.
The above shows a largely intuitive choice of approach to CSR by individual businesses. One can observe a trend showing that the vast majority, or even all business entities in the EU (including the Czech Republic), have at least a basic understanding of CSR and that an increasing number of them perceive CSR not as a bureaucratic burden and thus a threat to competition, but as a unique opportunity to actively engage in all three pillars of sustainability and to closely reflect not only narrowly economic aspects, but also social and environmental aspects in their long-term and daily strategies, i.e. All 6 CSR categories.
Businesses intuitively and in some places empirically find that this largely voluntary extension or acceptance of responsibility has the potential to dramatically contribute to (or directly create) competitive advantage – through the well communicated ability to do the right things the right way. Given the intangible nature of CSR and the complications associated with identifying its ‘tangible’ benefits for the business, its stakeholders and indeed society as a whole, the choice, implementation and reporting on CSR is a major challenge, not only for business, but also for the public bodies shaping the relevant framework, and naturally also for the academy, which can (and certainly should) get involved and help to embed CSR in theory as well as practice.