企业责任还是核心竞争力外文翻译.docVIP

Corporate responsibility or core competence? Barbara Hayes and Bridget Walker Although the concept that corporations are responsible not only to their shareholders but also for the social and environmental impacts of their activities has now entered the mainstream, pressure is still required to ensure that companies honour their public commitments. This article describes the work of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility in harnessing the power of individual shareholders and ethical investors in order to hold companies to account, with particular reference to the activities of Shell in Nigeria and the Republic of Ireland. It is argued that companies do not exist to carry out community development, and so should be judged not on these grounds but rather on the impact of how they conduct their core business. The rise of corporate responsibility Archaeology shows that trade has been an international activity since prehistoric times and since the seventeenth century it has been more or less global in reach. So globalisation is not new but from the last decades of the twentieth century its depth, technology, legal forms, and power differences have produced a qualitative change in its character. The current legal forms for companies developed gradually from the seventeenth century until the introduction of the Company Limited by Guarantee in 1855. In the UK, the 1985 Companies Act de?ned companies as legal persons able to enter contracts and hold property, while protecting shareholders from ?nancial risk in order to encourage innovation and economic development. Throughout this historic process there has been debate about the place of companies in society and how they should behave towards workers, customers, and others. Current company law recognises only the rights of shareholders, although other stakeholders have gained rights under employment, consumer, environmental, and other legislation. As companies became increasingly multinational in activity, ques