The Origins of CSR

Corporate Social Responsibility is a term popularly used now, with a variety of synonyms including corporate accountability, corporate ethics, and responsibility. The history of the concept itself, however, can be traced back to nearly 5000 years ago. In Ancient Mesopotamia, around 1700 BC, the king Hammurabi established a rule where farmers, peasants, and workers were killed if their activities or negligence resulted in the deaths of (or caused great inconvenience to) others. Further, in ancient Rome, if businesses did not contribute a certain amount of taxes to support military campaign, senators would complain and impose restrictions on their activities. In 1622, shareholders in the Dutch East India Company began issuing pamphlets regarding “self enrichment” and “management secrecy”. This changed with the industrial age, when war and the impacts of businesses on the environment as well as people around developed a different dimension.

With modernization, these impacts grew more pronounced and paternalism of Big Corporate companies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries fell, instead giving rise to a culture of philanthropy as a generalized trend. By the 1920s, discourses and ethical discussions on the responsibilities that such large profit-making bodies owed to the people and the environment came to the foray. CSR as a movement began coming into being, evolving and finally asserting itself when Howard Bowen released his now canonical “Social Responsibility of Businessmen” in 1953, using the phrase Corporate Social Responsibility for the first time. With time, the idea of CSR grew with greater environmental degradation, to reducing the carbon-footprint and adopting sustainable business practices in general — not merely in impulses through monetary contributions and charity, as was the trend with CSR previously. Later, the emergence of movements such as the effective altruist stream of thought has resulted in large charitable organizations emerging that streamline corporate funding and CSR.

The evolution of CSR is hence as old as business, and as young as comprehensive and inclusive compassion. The ambition of the industrialization periods was combined with the need for societal development and environmental protection. By the 1980s and 90s, the first company to truly implement CSR was Shell in 1998. Now, Through the 1990s, CSR was implemented at different levels in other companies such as Price Waterhouse Copper and KPMG. CSR eventually evolved beyond code of conduct and reporting, eventually it started taking initiative in NGOs, multiple stakeholders, and ethical trading.