英语论文网

s corporations to not just avoid harm from their actions, but to take actions viewed as positive for society.

Transparency International's guidance on reporting on the U.N. Global Compact's 10th Principle provides significantly more detail. This guidance places indicators into three different categories: [15]

(1) 'Commitment and Policy: how your organization has committed to a zero-toleration of corruption;'

(2) 'Implementation: how your organization's commitment has been put into practice through detailed policies and systems;' and

(3) 'Monitoring: how your organization monitors progress and has a continuous process for improvement.'

The CSR community is not merely determined for establishing the ethical principles corporations should follow when conducting business, but is focused on the process of ensuring that corporations are actually living up to those principles and working with relevant stakeholders to ensure continuous improvement in a constantly changing environment.

CSR in France
The idea of corporate social responsibility is an old one, whose origins can be traced, in particular, to the paternalism of certain employers (such as Koechlin in Mulhouse and Schneider at Le Creusot) in the late nineteenth century. Even codes of conduct, which today are one of the instruments for the advancement of social responsibility, are not a recent phenomenon: since the beginning of the twentieth century, professional organisations and commercial undertakings as well have been adopting texts containing social standards that employers must observe. An analysis of these first codes of conduct shows that, in most cases, they were adopted in the wake of major failures, the undertakings' objective being to 'put their house in order' rather than have the State do so with a heavier hand.

In most cases, socially responsible practices are regarded as commitments that have only purely moral value and are incapable of producing any legal effects. An analysis of French positive law, however, shows that social responsibility is exercised within an increasingly precise legal framework, particularly because the law encourages undertakings to adopt standards of social responsibility. These promptings may be addressed either to the investment funds, which then bring economic pressure to bear on the undertakings, or directly to the undertakings themselves. The first laws to cover the notions incorporated in CSR, though without this term being explicitly mentioned, appeared in France in the middle of the 1970s with a law on social reporting 1977. [16] Without referring specifically to CSR as such, this law already required that the social reports that were compulsory for companies with more than 300 employees should apply 134 specific measures and indicators, and these reflected notions are now commonly used in relation to CSR. Thus the social report required by this 1977 law opted deliberately for a social vision that focussed entirely on employees and social policies (Igalens and Joras 2002). However, it was mainly after 2000 that the body of legislation began to develop.

LEGAL PROVISIONS FOR CSR IN FRANCE
The turning point was undoubtedly the law of 15 May 2001 on new economic regulations.2 With the adoption of this 'NRE' law (loi Nouvelles RÂ′egulations Economiques), which today affects more than 700 listed compani