At CEPES, we believe that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) defines a leading business model that responds to current social demands.
CSR in an enterprise entails restructuring of its management systems, updating them to make them more agile, flexible and efficient.
Corporate Social Responsibility does not only involve the implementation of actions outside our enterprise. They have to become part of who we are, implementing them as a transaction; most of all, they must be something in which we believe. Essentially, if we wish to advance, the actions we carry out must be committed and efficient as well as profitable.
We configure CSR as a new idea of business, a new form of management, in line with current international debate that requires the enterprise to be more transparent, more sustainable and, in short, more responsible.
What really stands out is that concepts such as justice, equity, human rights, integration, cohesion and social progress, which traditionally were outside the sphere of business management, have become part of the business discourse and are repeatedly used in reports as the basis for the enterprise’s objectives and strategy.
We should not forget that CSR undoubtedly has a social dimension; as its name purports, it is the enterprise’s “social” responsibility, its responsibility unto society. Such process starts and takes place in society; its main protagonists are a variety of social agents and its objective is to improve the enterprise’s social role beyond current legislation and offering proof of responsibility in regard to all the stakeholders taking part or benefiting from the results of the production process.
The Social Economy enterprise is a form of business that, while balancing competition and competitiveness criteria, brings together the following values:
• Predominance of the person over capital.
• The sharing of profits using collective criteria.
• A democratic spirit in its organisation.
• Being collaborative with one’s own environment especially and a generator of social cohesion.
In Social Economy, we believe that implementing CSR in the enterprise leads to the restructuring of its management systems, updating them so they become agile, flexible and efficient and developing sensibilities that did not previously exist. This confirms that we are defining a new form of doing business. This is our current determination, one in which we continue to work.
Emili Villaescusa Blanca
Member of the Board of Directors of CEPES, Head of CSR division
Representative for the Social Economy on the State CSR Council
