Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability: The New Bottom Line?
Michael Fontaine

Abstract
Each year, thousands of not-for-profit; social services; educational; health care; and environmental organizations make pitches to corporate entities to help partially or fully fund projects they deem are for the common good. And thousands are funded with the promise of some benefit in return to the funding corporation in question; usually having bottom line metrics. And those companies, who give their money and other resources, probably deem themselves as being socially responsible; but what about beyond the bottom line? What about sustainability? Corporate social responsibility (CSR), also called corporate conscience, corporate citizenship, social performance, or sustainable responsible business is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company’s actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere. For ages, corporations measured success primarily on profits; but do profits guarantee that the corporation will still be around in the future? The thinking a little more than a decade ago, according to J. Ivancevich, P. Lorenzi, S. Skinner, and P. Crosby (1997), was that there was no specific standard that a firm followed since managers thought quite differently about what constituted social responsible behavior. Some managers viewed social responsibility as an obligation; others viewed it as a reactive situation; still others considered proactive behavior to be the proper position.

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