The concept of corporate social responsibility exerts wide appeal and brings together individuals and groups that were not traditional bedfellows. Environmental issues were an early focus, with NGOs campaigning to curb rainforest destruction and putting pressure on timber retailers. In the UK an alliance between businesses and the World Wide Fund for Nature led first to the formation of the 1995 Group, then to the Forest Stewardship Council, with its eco-labelling system to promote sustainable forest management.

Public protests over environmental or human rights abuses have spelt public relations disasters for many an offending company. Witness the controversy over Shell's conduct in Ogoniland, Nigeria, orchestrated by human rights and pro-environment NGOs. Development NGOs and charities like Oxfam were also first to market 'fair trade' products that guaranteed a viable deal for producers in developing countries, otherwise prey to exploitation and wildly fluctuating prices for their products.

Much ethical pressure group activity today centres on labour standards. Employment conditions have traditionally been the concern of trade unions and big UN institutions like the ILO. But many large companies are adopting 'codes of conduct' on their own initiative as evidence of their own good practice and in order ñ as they view it ñ to secure their market position. In the UK, the Ethical Trading Initiative, a government-funded project with trade union, corporate and NGO members, is pushing for standardisation of labour codes. Simultaneously, a new accreditation system for labour standards based on ILO and human rights conventions (SA8000) has recently been launched in the US. The latter has built-in procedures for monitoring a big advantage seeing that monitoring is the bugbear of the codes of conduct approach. SA8000's downside is that NGOs and the ILO tend to look askance on 'self-regulatory' initiatives from within the private sector. The ILO is handicapped by its constitutional articles from intervening at company level. But it has identified a way of influencing the behaviour of groups of enterprises. It recently sponsored an international tripartite agreement between employers, unions and governments to improve working conditions in Export Processing Zones, discussed in Auret van Heerden's article (overleaf). Governments are able to regulate company practises much more promptly in EPZs than in the economy at large.

New forms of marketing and product labelling mean that consumers are bombarded with information about the products on offer. Absence from the shelves of goods not displaying an ethical label can create a lever for further pressure from campaigners disposed to question the ethical standing of the supplier. Similarly, private investors increasingly want to know the nature of the stocks they buy, either directly or through their pension contributions.

Responses vary among businesses to the new wave of socially responsible thinking. Social and environmental audit reports are gaining popularity and a thriving consultancy sector caters to this need. The big challenge is for companies to develop beyond public relations, product labelling and other forms of 'window-dressing'. The 'triple bottom line' of economic, social and environmental probity offers a good business argument for pressing responsible conduct beyond the profit margin. But if companies want to be taken seriously they must integrate such ideas into the very core of their company culture.

Examples of good practice are emerging as positive models for change. Some are itemised in the article by Chris Marsden that follows, along with a newly derived evolutionary scale by which the progress of companies towards 'corporate citizenship' can be plotted. Maureen Quigley's piece describes the strategy of Pentland Group Plc, which is working with suppliers to improve conditions, starting by consulting with contract producers on worker health and safety and turning only later to more vexed employment standards issues.

The groundswell of change signalled by these articles is impressive. But has it fed back into poverty reduction or better social conditions in developing countries? Amid the burgeoning rhetoric, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that corporate social responsibility is supposed to be a means, not an end in itself. Too little has been done to trace the impacts of these major changes in the corporate world, on the communities of 'stakeholders' who are intended to gain.

A study by Save the Children's Caroline Harper and colleagues (overleaf) warns against misguided attempts to curb child labour out of hand, showing how a 'quick-fix' solution fired by moral panic proved of little use to children stitching footballs in Pakistan. Efforts to improve employment conditions on a more general scale often risk damaging those they set out to help. If firms that fail to demonstrate compliance with labour codes are driven out of business, workers may be driven into local sweatshops.

In academic circles, interest in corporate responsibility is on the rise, but it is at an early stage and has yet to take coherent shape. John Elkington's article (see over) throws down the gauntlet to the academic sector, calling for nothing less than a quantum leap in its awareness of the realities that prevail in the modern corporate marketplace. Turning to specific questions, major challenges awaiting researchers include:

• evaluating the social and economic impact of changes in corporate behaviour, highlighting the risks of unintentionally damaging effects (see below)
• helping identify areas of overlap or common ground between the environmental and social agendas. In many areas there appear to be trade-offs between environmental care and livelihood considerations. Under what circumstances and in what ways can they be reconciled?
• examining within developing countries, the distribution of value added tax from corporate activity vis-a-vis the corporation itself, its employees, central government (in taxes), regional and local authorities and local people (by way of damage mitigation schemes and local spending on development projects)
• benchmarking good practice. Corporations can and do learn more considerate behaviour. Some mining companies (for example) have successfully initiated policies based on integrated social and environmental provision.
• helping governments in developed and developing countries alike grow aware that social and ethical movements have raised expectations of corporate behaviour, and that corporations are now responding positively to such pressure.