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Corporate Social Responsibility in Romania: A Brief Survey

In October 2011, the European Commission proposed a new definition of CSR as being the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society (European Commission, 2011). As a European Union (EU) member state, Romanian organizations are expected to use henceforth this definition as the main framework. According to Mandl & Dorr (2007), Romanian organizations became familiar with the modern concept of CSR during the 1990s. An important step ahead for CSR evolution in Romania was the issuance of the National Strategy to Promote Social Responsibility 2011 and 2016. The present paper presents a brief survey of CSR in Romania based on the three recent studies published by Ernst & Young (2013, 2014, 2015) on CSR trends and realities in Romania and relate their results with some of the existing results published within the Romanian academic research. The results show that the CSR meaning remains blurry at the level of Romanian companies, in general. The results of this brief study are in accordance with the previous studies that showed the followings: a) CSR in Romania is a concept initially introduced (or rather imposed to their respective branches) by MNCs, (Iamandi, 2011); and in the cases of Romanian owned companies might be rather an imitation of the foreign practices (Obrad et al.2011); b) social responsibility programs are perceived as not important and irrelevant for the business, mainly by the Romanian owned companies (Cristache, 2011; c) the CSR in Romania is still at an early stage of development, despite the increase number of CSR initiatives; as Baleanu et al. (2011) showed, CSR is still punctual and targets relatively disparate activities with reputational aim; Zait et al. (2015) complete the image by highlighting that the CSR activities are based on wishes and circumstantial influences, subjective preferences and cultural inclinations of important managers of the respective companies; d)CSR seems to be developed rather due to the fact that it is perceived as 'politically correct' within the European Union, and fashionable. Still considered a frontier market economy, Romania lacks the investors' sophistication that might determine CSR to become a strategic tool for sustainable development. While the models of MNCs subsidiaries are good, they have to be adapted and transformed into Romanian companies 'own brand' of CSR activities. The numerous CSR initiatives at country level still lack coordination with the real social needs (maybe except for the natural environment). Thus, as Iamandi (2011) suggested, CSR development in Romania is expected to follow a path similar to other European countries. The pace of this development however is influenced by the specific domestic problems and perceptions.