Corporate social responsibility - Essay Example

These acts are not requirements either by law or by any other stipulated framework but are still carried out by business corporations under their CSR platforms (McWilliams, Siegel, & Wright, 2006). The business need for such activities may not be clear at first but considering that CSR activities are used as PR stunts by various business corporations, some business value can be derived from CSR. The contention behind CSR is for large corporations to project a soft image of a corporation that cares for the environment and the society.

This allows corporations to achieve better sales and integrate better with the consumers. The inclusion of business interests in CSR activities have the direct consequence of inflated CSR initiatives being used for marketing consorts. Research demonstrates that corporations have an overwhelming tendency to report the positive aspects of their CSR activities alone (Bebbington, Brown, Frame, & Thomson, 2007) (Dey, 2003) (Dey, 2007) (Ruffing, 2007). This tends to bias the reporting situation since corporations are inclined to report the better parts of their corporate behaviour alone.

The need was felt to bring to light information covered up by organisations at various levels (Dey, 2007). Silent and shadow accounting was evolved to deal with such a situation where the corporate behaviour of corporations was double checked through independent research. The silent account lists out the corporation’s projections on its CSR while the shadow account lists out an independent finding on the CSR of the concerned business corporation. The current paper will list out findings of the silent and shadow accounts for Procter and Gamble, which represents a top Fortune 500 business corporation.

The silent and shadow account for Procter and Gamble will be used to determine the dynamic validity of the state of CSR in practice by Procter and Gamble. Corporate Social Responsibility Silent Account Shadow Account Sustainability Reporting Style P&G lists that it reports CSR initiatives and their results based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) directives. More specifically, P&G utilises the G3Guidelines for reporting under GRI (P&G, 2012). A number of different CSR initiatives and their results – broadly categorised under Products, Operations and Social Responsibility, are available in the CSR report on the P&G website.

The availability of quantitative information such as emissions reductions levels, packaging reusability amounts etc. tend to add more credibility to P&G’s portfolio for CSR. The transparency of P&G’s claims for social responsibility requires that the data compiled by P&G be verified independently. The CSR report uploaded at the P&G website contains a number of different claims with regards to environmental and social impacts of CSR activities but fails to report data for verification. Essentially, P&G’s CSR report is referenced under the GRI and is indexed accordingly but does not declare the level of reporting (Cohen, 2011).

In addition, the CSR report provides a cue to the website to evaluate how GRI is implemented (P&G, 2013, p. 2) but the website provides no insight into how data is compiled and evaluated by P&G. No third party audit of the data is available to verify or substantiate the claims accordingly. Product Safety and Innovation One of the three key pillars for P&G’s sustainability framework is its products (P&G, 2012). The contention at P&G’