Today, more and more companies are taking their responsibility in different areas. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a concept that companies can use to express their responsibilities in a number of areas. CSR, however, lacks a uniform definition. The view on what the responsibilities are for the companies in different areas are not consistent. The Swedish real estate industry has been working with an environmental focus for a number of years. Today, companies are aware of real estates’ environmental impact and how they can work with the environment in a responsible manner. Discussions have begun over what other responsibilities the real estate sector has and how companies should respond to them. The purpose of this thesis is to locate where the Swedish real estate sector is staged within CSR and how they are addressing this issue. To examine this, a literature review is conducted on the meaning of CSR. The public material from a number of leading companies in CSR has been examined to see what makes their CSR work unique. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with some of Sweden's leading commercial real estate companies and an online survey was sent out to see how companies work with CSR compared to each other and how they define CSR. The results show that the Swedish real estate sector has recently begun working within this field. So far, only a few companies present themselves as CSR. It is relatively unclear in the industry what CSR means and many companies are instead talking about sustainability. What is surprising is that although the environmental issue has been so central in the sector several companies fail to recognize this issue, which means that there is still a lot left to do. Another interesting aspect is that despite the fact that few companies choose to demonstrate a commitment to CSR, the survey shows that a number of companies have involvement in those elements covered by CSR. Why these companies chose not to express themselves as a company with CSR responsibilities may be due to ignorance of what is required in the field. Other companies choose to wait to put resources into developing a strategy and instead see how it develops in the industry. Since a number of companies already demonstrate a CSR commitment and some are currently working on developing strategies for this, it can be assumed that CSR will grow in this industry.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-77487 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Gustafsson, Anna, Lumme Kinnunen, Henrietta |
| Publisher | KTH, Bygg- och fastighetsekonomi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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