Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility in the Service Sector: A Case Study From Turkey

2nd International Conference on Business and Management, Turkey, 1 - 04 July 2012, vol.4, no.2, pp.1-10

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

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES

Vol 4, No 2, 2012 ISSN: 1309-8047 (Online)

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.