Social Responsibility: a new target for companies -concepts, difficulties and opportunities

摘要

This work, at first, aims at identifying unanswered questions and unclear points in a particularly new and increasingly important subject: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). As time passes, Quality and Environment, through the union of companies, governments and society, have underlined their importance over the business way of thinking. However, although CSR is a forthcoming theme, it still needs further solid practices like, for instance, well-defined boundaries on which are companies' responsibilities and which ones are Governments attributions within a CSR perspective. As the transforming industry branch is in fact one of the biggest, but also one of the most potentially harmful for environment and society, as well as the natural chemical engineering work field, our research environment will be composed by companies from this field. The posture, the goals, the purpose of the projects created and maintained by them were evaluated in parallel with standards like SA 8000, AA 1000 and NBR 16001 and with the available references, with the objective of finding a common path for other companies from the transformirig industry branch, or maybe from other fields, to follow and achieve success on incorporating CSR in their activities. This research has, as a final goal, the development of an analytical overview, which has evaluated the enterprises viewpoints through the observation of their employees, reaching a broad view, focused on Rio de Janeiro State situation, of what can be understood, demanded and performed inside Corporate Social Responsibility reality. It was concluded that the CSR can permeate managerial structure of a company, when applied with target, focus, well-structured policies and dissemination, and due to that, can be perceived by their staff. The organizational structure applied by all studied companies was similar and the CSR was incorporated in matrix form with the other themes. As a recommendation, it can be said that companies must make more investments in external dissemination of their programs of CSR, as shown by its employees through interviews and questionnaires.