Corporate Social Responsibility: The Misty Concept

For decades now, there has been a certain type of conformism, in the sense that as soon as a concept is invented by a reputed organism or by a powerful state, it’s taken over by everyone and everyone embellishes it in its own way. Translating concepts from one language to another may seem trivial, but we often risks missing key elements, and with regard to economic concepts, we often neglect the spatial and temporal context relative to the appearance of this or that notion, and it is mistakenly believed that such a word has the same meaning in all languages. The consequence of this can be very dangerous because, in addition to misunderstanding, this can lead to poor application and the remedy that is recommended to reduce the effects of an evil, reinforce them even more. In this paper, we will try to describe a major concept in development economics that is of Corporate Social Responsibility and demonstrate, by etymological analysis and by conclusions drawn from the literature that addressed the subject that this term was poorly translated from English into other languages (especially French and Arabic), and thus it is misunderstood and sometimes misused by companies to deceive consumers and public opinions by a practice called “Greenwashing”: to realize more profits, by making them believe to a pseudo responsibility towards the environment and society.