Awareness Trainings - Draft #1

I/VIII Corporate Cultural Responsibility
The CSR of the Future
While the efficiency of national public policies is decreasing and the « Y » Millennial generation’s
expectations are raising, ethical commitments become a necessary value for the sustainability of
the common good and the business itself.
CSR is a positive vision of the role of corporations in society that rejects the existence of a conflict
between the benefits and the social concerns for companies. CSR policies are not a specific part of
the organization charts anymore. CSR policies are not a precise engagement anymore. CSR is
now a business strategy as well as a societal commitment.
When asked about the future of business responsibility, Lockheed Martin’s CEO highlighted the
current evolution « from the footprint of the carbon emissions to the human handprint of the human
impact of business on people ».
Today, CSR is not only about westernized values and expectations: southern people will have to be
satisfied too: the CSR of the future is a multilateral and glocalized CSR.
In a world of interdependencies common good is more than ever at stake, and we believe that
cultural ethics are also going to drive the next wave of innovation and growth in the global
economy.
CCR background
(ISO) 26000 guidelines for social responsibility make an explicit, somewhat trailblazing case for
formally integrating cultural concerns into CSR-related policies, with a call to all corporations to
promote cultural activities and respect and value local cultures, cultural traditions, and heritages in
the settings in which corporations function.
We notice a (national) cultural backgrounds influence and orient conceptions and understandings
of corporate responsibilities (Freeman and Hasnaoui, 2010; Kim and Kim, 2010; Waldman, 2006;
Wang and Juslin, 2009).
CSR efficiency is now about adapting CSR policies and ethics programs to different cultural
settings to accommodate legitimate cultural differences (Arthaud-Day, 2005; Husted and Allen,
2006; Logsdon and Wood, 2002).
However, culture is not only as a contextual variable to consider when developing proficient
business activities but rather a societal constituent that may be subject to the impacts of business
activities, as well as an end in itself: CCR is about to pay much closer attention to how
organizations alter and even create their (human) environments.