IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/csrchp/978-3-319-26668-8_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Corporate Social Responsibility and Development in South Africa: Socio-economic Contexts and Contemporary Issues

In: Corporate Social Responsibility in Sub-Saharan Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Natascha Mueller-Hirth

    (Robert Gordon University)

Abstract

This chapter will discuss historical contexts and contemporary issues in Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa. Here, the private sector has been forced to adopt socially responsible policies that are more advanced than those in many of the richer economies; spending in Corporate Social Investment (CSI) far exceeds that of wealthier countries. This is due to the adoption of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation, the set of affirmative action policies adopted by the post-apartheid government to give historically disadvantaged groups economic opportunity. Relationships between business and society in South Africa are thus significantly shaped by the country’s divided history of colonialism and apartheid, as well as by its present developmental challenges. Indeed, given that big business was one of the main beneficiaries of the Apartheid regime, it was ironically apartheid and the social unrest that it brought about that first stimulated corporate social responsibility practices in the country. Today, any South African company’s performance is rated on a number of BEE scorecards, with companies collecting points for Corporate Social Responsibility. Although corporate involvement in development is usually portrayed as diametrically opposed to the state’s involvement, the South Africa government has a very active role in defining and motivating CSR. At the same time, CSR funding is becoming ever more vital for the non-profit sector, with NGOs receiving an average of 20 % of their income from corporations. Moreover, CSI spending in 2012 by the top 200 South African companies alone amounted to a total of R7 billion, of which over a third was channelled through non-profit organisations. These complex intersectoral relationships under the banner of CSR have led to a maturing and professionalisation of companies’ CSR strategies and practices in recent years, which this chapter will outline with reference to recent scholarship and to original research by the author.

Suggested Citation

  • Natascha Mueller-Hirth, 2016. "Corporate Social Responsibility and Development in South Africa: Socio-economic Contexts and Contemporary Issues," CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, in: Stephen Vertigans & Samuel O. Idowu & René Schmidpeter (ed.), Corporate Social Responsibility in Sub-Saharan Africa, edition 1, chapter 0, pages 51-68, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-319-26668-8_3
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-26668-8_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lance Wentzel & Julius Ayodeji Fapohunda & Rainer Haldenwang, 2023. "A Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Model to Achieve Sustainable Business Performance (SBP) of SMEs in the South African Construction Industry," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(13), pages 1-28, June.
    2. Bianca I Chigbu & Fhulu H Nekhwevha, 2022. "The extent of job automation in the automobile sector in South Africa," Economic and Industrial Democracy, Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden, vol. 43(2), pages 726-747, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-319-26668-8_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.