Perspectives of Future Trends of Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility : Illustrated with Four Case Studies of Swedish Multinational Companies

Abstract: The ecological pressure threatening our planet is about to become even more severe as population is expected to grow 30 % by 2050. The injustices between the developed and the developing countries are enormous, where the developing countries have to survive on just a small fraction of what the developed countries consume.In order for our planet to remain sustainable large changes have to be made.As large multinational companies represent a majority of the world trade they have to assume an extra large part of responsibility in order for the changes to happen. Based on this I have conducted a qualitative research based on semi structured interviews with four multinational Swedish corporations with the aim to identify future trends of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR). The definition of CSR in this study was “human rights”, “anti-corruption”, “labour standards” and “environment”.The results of this research show that the companies in this study have CSR programs that are designed to help fulfilling their missions and goals, which means that the firms practice strategic CSR. “Human rights”, “anti-corruption” and “labour standards” is considered to be very important today and to a large extent taken for granted in Sweden. Business value is being allocated to ”labour standards” and “environment”. The major change foreseen in the future is that the business value of “environment” is expected to increase dramatically.The corporations covered in this research are increasingly taking their responsibility and the trend is going towards having CSR fully integrated in their businesses, being an increasingly important part of their strategies and a natural part of everyday business.