Corporate Social Responsibility for Multi-national Organizations - Essay Example

Companies like GE, BP, Starbucks, Dell, Pfizer, and Apple are loved and hated by many people for many different reasons (Colvin, 2006). However, none of these companies can afford their brand name and image to be tarnished in any way. Undoubtedly, we are living in the information age and even rumors about a company’s suppliers maltreating employees in China, or the company’s employees facing racial as well as gender based discrimination can have real effects on the bottom line of the company.

Even though it is possible for a company to be appreciated based on its financial performance alone (Forbes, 2005), greater appreciation comes with social responsibility along with financial performance (Natural Health, 2005). The combination of these two forces means that a company has to be extremely careful in maintaining its image as well as its profits. Social responsibility is not merely an idea for exceeding the ethical responsibility of a company; it is the chance to seek out an image that has remained exclusively in the domain of NGOs and social organizations i.e. being a ‘green’ company.

While this implies being environmentally friendly, the environment includes a lot more than making sure that the smokestacks of the industry do not create more than an acceptable level of pollution. In the context of social responsibility, the environment also includes the business environment of the company including who supplies material to the firm and who buys its products. Strangely enough, GE has been rated as the most admired company in America (Fisher, 2006) as well as the world (Demos, 2006) yet it has only published two corporate responsibility reports in all its existence.

The first one was published in 2005 and the second one was published this year (GE, 2006). Considering that several other companies have been publishing such reports since 1995,