Abstract
Stemming from the time of early British industrial philanthropists what we now refer to as corporate social responsibility (CSR) has had a long and influential history in the United Kingdom and across large swathes of the world through colonial and post-colonial periods. In this chapter, the roots of contemporary policies and actions being implemented in the name of CSR are explored. This then enables a review of the fluctuating profile and practices over the last 200 years before going on to concentrate on the post 1980 period when CSR became a more widely recognised concept to differing degrees within British based Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs). National and international reasons for greater public interest and corporate engagement are outlined. The chapter concludes with analysis of CSR in today’s post financial meltdown period and some tentative thoughts on future directions.
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Vertigans, S. (2015). Corporate Social Responsibility in the United Kingdom. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Fifka, M. (eds) Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13566-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13566-3_3
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