Why Should Corporations be Socially Responsible?

            Let me start this journal with my own definition of Corporate Social Responsibility. Corporate Social Responsibility, for me, is the way how companies can give back to the community. In our today’s session, we discussed how Mr. Cecilio Pedro Kwok, the founder of Lamoiyan Corporation, employed hearing impaired individuals and gave them the equal opportunity to work in his company as part of his CSR campaign.

            Corporate Social Responsibility is increasingly becoming popular among large corporations. We have seen several large companies implementing different CSR projects to help the community however, it also raises a question among many individuals and that is “Does the company do this to help sincerely or does they have a hidden agenda in implementing all these CSR campaigns” and thus brings me to my topic of the day which is “Why Should Corporations be Socially Responsible?”

            In today’s discussion on the introduction to CSR, we have discussed several reasons why companies should be socially responsible. Taking the example of our case analysis today, Mr. Pedro, the owner of Lamoiyan Corporation, took the risk of engaging in a CSR for his company and that is to hire hearing impaired individuals and make them part of the company. It is well stated in the case that there are a lot of adjustments that have to be made in order to accommodate the hearing impaired workers but it is not impossible. By doing this, Lamoiyan’s CSR has been well regarded by the community and even brought fame to Lamoiyan Corporation. The question now is does its CSR implementation affect the overall business of the company? In a nutshell, yes, I believe it has affected the image of the company but when we look at it thoroughly, it is not the business that is being changed by its CSR implementations rather its leaders and its stakeholders.

            By taking on CSR initiatives, business leaders are inspired to be better in order to serve more people which then lead to the business looking beyond profits rather looking more on how it can help the community. Reflecting on our today’s discussion, I realized that Corporate Social Responsibility should not only be for corporations rather it should be implemented even by ordinary individuals like us. We should not wait until we are business leaders before we start to implement large projects rather we should start looking at something we can do for the community. Reason is that if we act socially responsible today, it would change us to be socially responsible business leaders in the future.