CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Across the globe, changes in business environments have led to new and greater demands on business organizations to reconsider their major business objectives and operations as they affect the well-being of the general society and immediate operating environments. Today, new regulations, changes in customer’s tastes and preferences, globalization, advanced technological innovations, new product development, and new market competitions, have brought new challenges that organizations must cope with in order to survive and perform effectively for the attainment of business goals and objectives. As competition among business organizations grow stronger, every organization looks forward for ways to gain competitive advantage over their rivals. Organizations, therefore, are seeking for and creating new strategies that will ensure their survival and growth in other to achieve predetermined and emergent goals and objectives. Among recent strategies organizations have resulted to, are involvement in corporate social responsibility activities and communicating of same. In the last few decades, there has been a popular outcry for organizations to be alive to their social responsibilities. The call for business organizations to live up to their corporate social responsibilities is most likely to continue because we now have more enlightened society, and every citizen is directly or indirectly affected by the operations and activities of business organizations. Besides, education and increased awareness generated by the media have contributed to make CSR a no push-over in our current corporate business world (Baridam, 1995; Aluko et al., 2004).
Corporate social responsibility could be defined as the recognition that business activities have some impact on the entire society and the consideration of that impact in the business decision making. Therefore, most business sense of responsibility towards the communities in which they operate in new of the adverse effect of production operation on these communities. Some of social adverse effect range from health hazard, displacement human settlement to environment pollution. Shall petroleum development company for instance, has been grappling with the restive behaviour of youths in its area of operation occasioned by the activities of vil companies. Also output whether that of product and or service could have adverse effects consumers some common example are cigarettes and medical drugs. Business for have the responsibility of educating user of their products or service on their correct usage in order to avoid sizzle effects.
Business organization also snow that they are socially responsible to their host communities by complimenting the efforts of the government by providing infrastructure facilities like schools, hospitals, tarred road and even supporting sports and cultures. It is with the foreign in mind that the research carried out this work to identify the effects of social responsibility in Enugu state as well as proffer solutions to the likely problems associated with discharging it.