ISO 26000—A Standardised View of Corporate Social Responsibility Practices, Cases and Facts: An Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has continued to reshape and transform a number of business practices, including the way corporate entities of the twenty-first century perceive and report on both their financial and non-financial activities to their stakeholders and the world at large. In the quest for responsible reporting of the non-financial aspects of organisations, the Global Reporting Initiative, a set of CSR reporting guidelines came into being in 1997, the Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000) a social certification standard for factories and organisations across the globe came into being also in 1997, the UN Global Compact came unto the global corporate reporting scene in July 2000, there are a few others like them which are now available to global corporate entities when reporting on their non-financial activities. Social responsibility reporting has become important in recent times for accountability, transparency and good business practice reasons. Corporations of this era have understood the enormous benefits derivable when they provide to readers these social reports on how they are dealing with the environmental, social and governance (ESG) aspects of their operational activities Idowu and Papasolomou (2007). Many of these international reporting guidelines have been put in place to help organisations that aspire to be active and be perceived as being socially responsible in this regard in the quest to provide understandable social information to their stakeholders. Not only that these international guidelines have been put in place to facilitate easy comparability between two similar companies either in the same sector or those in different sectors entirely information contained in their social reports.