CORPORATE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE SERVICE SECTOR: A CASE STUDY FROM TURKEY

Year 2012, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 11 - 20, 01.06.2012

Gokce Akdemir Omur Aysegul Ozbebek Tunc Esra Nemli Caliskan

Abstract

As the world is rapidly approaching its limits in terms of both environmental and
social problems, businesses are increasingly expected to attend to issues of
socially and environmentally responsible performance. In addition that demands
for heightened levels of corporate social and environmental responsibility are
being pressed through regulatory initiatives in many countries, corporations at the
same time are realizing that being environmentally and socially responsible makes
good business sense. In the dynamic and competitive world, businesses try to
differentiate themselves from their competitors by adopting a more integrative
approach to their social and environmental responsibilities. Corporate social and
environmental responsibility (CSER) is a helpful conceptual framework for
exploring the corporate attitude of companies towards stakeholders. Stakeholders
today are increasing their corporate social and environmental responsibility
expectations for all businesses either in products or services market. Corporate
social and environmental responsibility is an integrative concept that overlaps
with environmental management, business ethics, corporate citizenship and
corporate sustainability. Much of the literature concerning CSER concentrates on
heavy industries such as the mining, chemical and energy sectors; there is a lack
of research on CSER in the service sector. This paper, after a brief theoretical
introduction on CSER, will focus on the corporate social and environmental
responsibility activities in the Turkish banking sector as an example from the
service sector.

Keywords

Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility (CSER), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environmental Management, Competitive Advantage

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