A literature review on corporate social responsibility: definitions, theories and recent empirical research.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a popular research stream in business administrations' theory, as the increasing number of publications and specialised journals indicate. There can be identified numerous attempts in literature to define CSR. In a first step, the paper reviews selected attempts, in order to clarify the basic understanding of CSR. Furthermore, theoretical concepts of CSR will be discussed. Subsequently, empirical studies, analysing the state of implementation of CSR, will be presented. The paper aims to systematically categorise the different research approaches, in order to provide a general overview. Recent studies in Germany indicate that finance departments are almost not involved in CSR implementation. This nourishes doubts of a company wide implementation of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]