Corporate social responsibility as a factor influencing the development of social accounting and assessment of employers

The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is based on voluntary responsibility of companies for their operations in economic, social and environmental spheres as well as for ethical behavior. In accounting, it is reflected in the form of social accounting which deals with disclosing information on the organization’s achievements in respect of the CSR concept implementation. During the current economic crisis, company relationships with employees have become the most important of all the issues related to CSR. Additional challenges in this respect are posed by Generation Y comprising the people born after 1980 who enter the labor market. For them, the socially responsible employer is even more important than high earnings. The main aim of this paper is to present the results of the research carried out at the end of 2010 among a group of external students at Cracow University of Economics. The research was conducted one month before the students obtained their Bachelor’s degrees. The survey focused on determining how much knowledge the prospective graduates had about CSR, how important CSR was to them as a criterion for selection of their workplace and how they regarded the inclusion of information on CSR in the framework of the company’s accounting system.