Editorial: Business Ethics in a European Perspective: A Case for Unity in Diversity?

Excerpt

With its “Renewed EU Strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility” (European Commission 2011), the European Commission has taken a further step to launch the idea of responsible business behavior across Europe. In this vein, the Commission defines Corporate social responsibility (CSR) as “the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society” (European Commission 2011, p. 6) and explicitly refers to the need “to acknowledge the role that complementary regulation plays in creating an environment more conducive to enterprises voluntarily meeting their social responsibility” (European Commission 2011, p. 5). To foster the idea of CSR, the Commission sees it as task of public authorities to “play a supporting role through a smart mix of voluntary policy measures and, where necessary, complementary regulation.” (European Commission 2011, p. 7). Although the Commission sees Corporate Responsibility primarily as voluntary corporate engagement, it is yet obvious that such engagement should be encouraged by political authorities. Thus, and in contrast to US-American ideas of more explicit CSR (Matten and Moon 2008; Hiss 2009), political authorities play an important role in recent European business ethics discussion and especially the CSR debate (Forte 2013; Lock and Seele 2016). …