This book provides a comprehensive overview of corporate social responsibility and its development in Africa. It provides in-depth studies on 11 sub-Saharan countries, demonstrating that corporate social responsibility is forming and going through different stages of metamorphosis in the continent. Though corporate and individual attitudes towards sustainability in Africa still leave a lot to be desired, this book showcases how things are rapidly changing for the better in this regard. It demonstrates and provides evidence for the fact that corporate social responsibility contributes significantly to the way sub-Saharan African economies are being transformed, with service sectors expanding, commercial activities diversifying and industrial bases growing through the initiatives of small, medium and large organizations and innovators supported by widespread higher-education program rollouts. The book highlights how progressive and wide-ranging CSR approaches have emerged, and how much they differ from the obsolete approaches of the past, which promulgated negative stereotypes, marginalized communities and positioned them as victims or beneficiaries of development.
Author Biography:
Stephen Vertigans is Head of School of Applied Social Studies, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. His research interests include Corporate Social Responsibility in the energy sector, with particular attention placed upon social impacts in Africa. To this end he has visited numerous African countries to help build capacity and to investigate how CSR approaches can help overcome deep rooted social problems and political tensions. Stephen was instrumental in the introduction of a MSc programme looking at CSR and Energy. He has published widely across a range of fields including Corporate Social Responsibility, African studies and forms of political violence.Samuel O. Idowu is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Corporate Social Responsibility at the London Guildhall Faculty of Business & Law, London Metropolitan University, UK. He researches in the fields of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Governance, Business Ethics and Accounting and has published in both professional and academic journals since 1989. He is a freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators. Samuel is a Vice President of the Global Corporate Governance Institute. He has led several edited books in CSR and is the Editor-in-Chief of two Springer’s reference books – the Encyclopaedia of Corporate Social Responsibility and the Dictionary of Corporate Social Responsibility. He is also a Series Editor for Springer’s books on CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance. One of his edited books was ranked 18th in the 2010 Top 40 Sustainability Books by, Cambridge University, Sustainability Leadership Programme. Samuel is a member of the Committee of the Corporate Governance Special Interest Group of the British Academy of Management (BAM). He is on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Business Administration, Canada and Amfiteatru Economic Journal, Romania. Samuel has delivered a number of Keynote Speeches at national and international conferences and workshops on CSR and has on two occasions 2008 and 2014 won Emerald’s Highly Commended Literati Network Awards for Excellence. To date, Samuel has edited several books in the field of CSR, Sustainability and Governance and has written four forewords to books. Samuel has served as an external examiner to the following UK Universities – Sunderland, Ulster, Anglia Ruskin and Plymouth. He is currently an external examiner at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and Teesside University, Middlesbrough and Sheffield Hallam University.
Prof. Dr. René Schmidpeter holds the Dr. Juergen Meyer Endowed Chair for International Business Ethics and CSR at Cologne Business School (CBS). He is a guest professor at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics in China and the academic head of the “Zentrum für humane Marktwirtschaft” (Centre for Humane Market Economy) in Salzburg, Austria. For more than 15 years, he has worked and done research in the field of corporate social responsibility. He edited several publications on CSR for Springer, for example CSR in Europe (2015), Sustainable Entrepreneurship (2014), Social Innovation (2013) and Corporate Social Responsibility (2012/2015). Rene Schmidpeter is also Section Editor of the Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility and Editor of the intenational book series "CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance" as well as the International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility (JCSR) at Springer.
