Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR – in Italian: Responsabilità Sociale delle Imprese - RSI) is a corporate strategic setting developed at international level in the last decades and aimed at assuring economic profit while promoting social issues  and environmental protection where enterprises operate.

Indeed, the OECD Guidelines emphasize the links between economic, social and environmental progress and the strict complementary relation between the multinational enterprises’ activities and sustainable development. They encourage enterprises not only to rigorously observe the laws of the Countries in which they operate, but also to go beyond, by promoting human rights respect , contributing to the development of human capital and to the environment protection and making a responsible usage of their contractual power in their relation with Governments and with local economic operators and communities.  

CSR is thus a strategy integrating ethical concerns, by definition not legally enforceable, in the ordinary enterprise management. Its fundamental concepts are:

• attention to stakeholders: “stakeholder” is a concept set - different from “shareholder” - in that it includes not only the holders of specifically economic interests and rights, but also those more generally encompassed within the influence of the enterprise’s activities: employees, suppliers, clients, social reference community, lobbies, future generations;
• voluntary character: i.e.  the free choice of an enterprise to adopt a socially responsible conduct, satisfying and operating beyond the legal, commercial and public duties it is expected to observe.  

CSR is  not in contradiction with the enterprise profitability. It is instead a strategy pursuing economic success also by winning the confidence of the individuals and groups crucial for its survival. For large, rmedium and small enterprises to voluntarily integrate the ethical concerns in their strategic view means to become socially legitimate by means of the benefits they bring to society and thus, to gain a competitive advantage.

A socially responsible conduct also has positive effects on the side of the financial markets, in that a growing number of institutions adopted social and environmental criteria for the selection of the firms in which to invest in shares and bonds. There are many well established examples such as the FTSE4Good Index Series , that  measures the performance of companies meeting globally recognised corporate responsibility standards in the fields of environmental sustainability, relations with the stakeholders and support to human rights; and Eurosif, the European Social Investment Forum) , that through the work of the six national Social Investment Forums (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, UK and Belgium) helps its affiliates promoting sustainability in the financial markets.