During the last few years in particular, the significance of social consciousness has highly increased: especially in business, the so-called Corporate Social Responsibility becomes more and more important and is today playing a decisive role in corporate governance.
But what does CSR actually mean? It can be defined as the company’s responsibility towards the environment and society. However, businesses have the primary ambition to maximize profits, which sounds in a first way difficult to combine with CSR, at least in a short-term view.
Correspondingly, we could ask ourselves to what extend CSR should be totally voluntary work of companies, or in other words, what role should the government play in business, particularly in relation to social and environmental responsibility?
Government certainly has to interfere in business concerning CSR, because it affects not only the companies but the whole society. But how far is government really able to influence, and owing to which measures?

First of all, companies are often pushed by their own greed of gain, difficult to combine with social and ecological responsibility, which makes an intervening of the government indispensable.
Influenced by shareholders and their rational desire of obtaining high returns, companies are supposed to think in a short way and do often not recognize the necessity and also the opportunities of CSR in their company. However, recent studies clearly indicated that a corporation’s commitment concerning social and environmental aspects has a positive impact on productivity of employees on the one hand and on the company’s reputation on the other hand. Therefore the government, which naturally profits from long-term successful companies, should intervene in order to achieve a rethinking on that aspect, so that corporations do not consider CSR as a supplemental charge, but as an investment.