Corporate social responsibility (CSR) – A Key Factor to an Organization’s Success

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not a refreshing concept for the management of an organization in recent years. This concept refers to a firm, which has more responsibilities to adapt the needs of objectives apart from its stakeholders and owners in commercial, legal, ethical, and environmental ways (Beal and Goyen, 2005), and the responsibilities are achieved by meeting or exceeding the commercial, ethical, legal and philanthropic expectation from these objectives. The concept of corporate social responsibility was firstly introduced by the publication of Bowen's Social Responsibility of Businessmen in 1953, while almost all known companies have integrated this spirit into their business model. Nowadays, the promotion of corporate social responsibility has even become not only the wider responsibilities in which an organization contributes to society but also an approach to promote an organization's corporate image (Chang, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss the concept of corporate social responsibility regarding economic, ethical, legal, and philanthropic aspects, and the objectives served by corporate social responsibility such as environments, the society, and the public. This paper then explains how the realization of CSR from one organization can bring effects to its stakeholders and how the organization can obtain benefits from the implementation. Finally, this paper includes two cases from well-known companies in Taiwan, namely TSMC (Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company) and FPG (Formosa Plastics Group) about how these companies successfully realize corporate social responsibility, and the impacts that influence the stakeholders, and the benefits they obtain for their corporate images.