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

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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