Corporate Citizenship

[Page 678]This entry discusses the ways in which companies can evidence what is called good corporate citizenship. Corporate citizenship, alternatively called corporate responsibility, can be defined as the ways in which a company’s strategies and operating practices affect its stakeholders, the natural environment, and the societies where the business operates. In this definition, corporate citizenship encompasses the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which involves companies’ explicit and mainly discretionary efforts to improve society in some way, but is also directly linked to a company’s business model in that it requires companies to pay attention to all their impacts on stakeholders, nature, and societies. Corporate citizenship is, in this definition, integrally linked to the ethical, social, ecological, political, and economic impacts that derive from a ...