Corporate responsibility (CR) management is defined as the task of businesses to identify, in an efficient and systematic way, areas for action where corporate responsibility activities support the achievement of objectives and where strategic decisions are taken based on these insights and applied in an operational context. Questions include: Which stakeholders and CR issues are essential for the company? How can individual CR issues be linked to corporate strategy? How can appropriate targets, indicators, and action plans be developed? How is CR performance reviewed and evaluated? This volume of "SML essentials" demonstrates how to construct a modern, professionally designed, and more credible management approach to corporate responsibility. It is intended to enable the reader to analyze and evaluate the corporate responsibility management of a given company according to defined criteria on the basis of information in the public domain.

Fridolin S. Brand, PhD, has been working as a research associate at the Center for Corporate Responsibility at the ZHAW School of Management and Law since 2015. After studying biology, sustainability, and ethics at the universities of Mainz, Greifswald, and Perth, he attained his doctorate in 2009 on the subject of resilience and sustainable development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). From 2009-2012, Fridolin Brand conducted post-doctoral studies in sustainability sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, and from 2012-2015 in sustainability management at Südzucker AG. Herbert Winistörfer, dipl. phil. II, is a senior lecturer and Head of the Center for Corporate Responsibility at the ZHAW School of Management and Law. He teaches on issues of corporate responsibility and sustainability management. Hies field of research comprises approaches and tools for companies to manage societal issues in an international context. A particular focus area is the ISO 26000 standard on Social Responsibility and its implementation in small and medium-sized businesses. Herbert Winistörfer is Head of Program for the certificate course CAS in Corporate Responsibility/Social Management.