The Strategic Connotations of Corporate Social Responsibility - Dissertation Example

Generally, when we talk about CSR initiatives, it includes social, ethical, and governance issues, philanthropy and community involvement, product security, equal opportunities, human rights, and environmental functions. From the point of view of accounting, the role of CSR is essentially and inseparably related to social and environmental reporting or accounting. Social accounting has been an old concept relating a product to safety, to some extent, in the social responsibility movement during the 1960s ( Drucker, 1965), but environmental concerns were also not far behind (Gray and Guthrie, 2007).

The importance of environmental issues increased relatively to social issues although social issues were prominent earlier. The program of sustainable banking growth is getting nearer to humanitarian and social problems, as the environment-related planning is widening in scope due to emerging bigger growth and security-related challenges. Sustainability issues are complex; therefore, require problem-specific policies, strategies, and initiatives for managing exposures and impacts relatively better for banks themselves, their customers, and stakeholders (UNEP, 2011).

Regarding appraisal of sustainability, the processes for organizing sustainability assessments have to be transparent and boost for all related stakeholders. Any sustainability appraisal needs to be capable of recognizing not only economic, environmental, and social impacts but also the synergies and resulting trade-offs. Appraisals need to be organized in stages including a relevance test on the need for a sustainability appraisal for the issue at hand. This research aims to find out banks’ sustainability accounting and accountability practices.

Banks’ approaches toward economic, social, and environmental accounting will be examined with a special focus on HSBC bank UK, as a case study. The primary objective of this research is to know the perspectives of the UK-based Banks on sustainability-related issues by discussing and analyzing their social and environmental accounting practices in the context of sustainability. More specifically, this research will select a leading bank, HSBC bank, as a case study to measure its adherence to reporting initiatives, as stipulated in the Global Reporting Initiatives.