Corporate Social Responsibility and the Company Essay

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Company - Essay Example It is for this reason that the company has stated emphatically that â€Å"over the past year, our company has delivered on my challenge to "broaden and accelerate" our commitment to sustainability† (Duke, 2011). As a matter of fact, corporate social responsibility cuts across several sectors of society and of a company though it has mostly been mistaken to be the benefit that society alone gets from a company. To a large extent, â€Å"Corporate social responsibility is about how businesses align their values and behavior with the expectations and needs of stakeholders including suppliers, communities, regulators, special interest groups and society as a whole† (CSR Network, 2011). Wal-Mart has been guided by this realization to ensure that social satisfaction is created not only for customers and investors but also to all other leading stakeholders. Specific mention can be made of some of milestones reached in the corporate responsibility business for Wal-Mart. To show integration of the social responsibility commitment, Wal-Mart has matured from a stage where corporate social responsibility was seen as a philanthropic add-on to a level where its corporate social responsibility pivots around â€Å"responsible consumption" and creation of "shared value†. ... This report seeks to elaborate on the Wal-Mart's Sustainability 360 approach. Wal-Mart's Sustainability 360 approach (The Slow Greening of Wal-Mart) Carbon emission has been identified to have adverse effect on humans and other living organisms. It also has unfavorable effects on other non-living components of the environment and threatens an ill-resourced future. In a report by PwC in advance of the Stern Review report published in the UK on 30 October 2006, it was documented that the effect and result of carbon emission could be more than doubling by 2050 (PwC, 2006). In most cases, when calls for carbon emission reduction are made, accusing fingers are quickly pointed to manufacturers and industrialists. One may therefore think that Wal-Mart has taken up carbon emission campaign because the company is a retailer and not directly involved in carbon production. This argument is however not justified because as a retailer, Wal-Mart deals directly with manufacturers and producers and therefore has every moral authority to campaign for a greening environment. Wal-Mart therefore targeted carbon emission as one of the component aspects of the Wal-Mart Sustainability 360 project in a program dubbed Slow Greening. In the Slow Greening Project, the company’s target is its suppliers as Roner (2007) notes that â€Å"the company’s suppliers will now be asked to measure and report the energy used to make and distribute its products.† This means that the Slow Greening Project is dedicated to both carbon emission reduction and energy efficiency and therefore very suitable for the Sustainability 360 Project. In championing the campaign, the symbol has been associated with the Slow Greening. The symbolism here is that