Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a phenomenon that comes from the USA, where it has been practised since the late 1800s in the form of corporate philanthropy or donating money to charity. In Denmark, on the other hand, CSR did not really gain ground until 1994, when the Danish Minister of Social Affairs, at the time, Karen Jespersen, initiated a CSR campaign called ¿Our common concern¿. This campaign called on companies to actively help deal with the problems of unemployment and social exclusion. This book seeks to test the assumptions that American companies mainly engage in philanthropic CSR initiatives, and that Danish companies focus on retention of their current employees and integration of people who are otherwise excluded from the labour market. Hence, it is decided to conduct a study of nine Danish and nine American companies¿ corporate websites divided into three lines of businesses: phone companies, supermarkets/warehouses and furniture manufactures.