Corporate Social Responsibility as a Reference Tool in Career Development

Establishing an assessment of corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related human resource (HR) practices poses both significant conceptual and methodological issues. This chapter specifies in this first part the definitions and the methodology implemented in this research. I insist that CSR is based on an ethical and legal use of the concept of responsibility before specifying who defines these “socially responsible” HR practices and the methods they adopt in companies. Transposed to the level of companies, the moral use of responsibility can be stated as follows: faced with situations with both threatening and promising aspects for the future, companies must reflect on the irreversible character of their acts and on the partially unpredictable consequences of decisions before committing to action. This transposition of the concept of responsibility at the corporate level poses problems of interpretation. To what extent do Romanian companies apply the notion of social responsibility in their human resource management (HRM) practices? Are they looking to develop HR practices that go beyond enforcing the law? To answer these questions, we present the results of a survey of 106 HR professionals, most of whom belong to large industrial Romanian companies. Their testimonies, collected through questionnaires, relate to a limited set of socially responsible HR practices. According to our results, HRM practices hardly integrate the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR); they essentially respond to the rules of law.