Abstract
This article revolves around the assessment of corporate social responsibility in relation to pharmaceutical firms. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming an increasingly important dimension in the corporate landscape. The rise of ethical awareness of stakeholders has prompted many global corporations to adopt CSR policies. This study shines the light on pharmaceutical firms to gauge the level of CSR in this industry. Five of the largest pharmaceutical firms were evaluated using the global reporting initiative (GRI) guidelines as a benchmark. The results showed an unexpectedly large variety in the performance of the companies, with some areas of CSR being emphasised, while others were largely ignored. This is partly due to lack of relevance of certain GRI performance metrics to the pharmaceutical industry. We conclude that the pharmaceutical industry's CSR initiatives require much improvement to be deemed comprehensive. Current major CSR guidelines, including GRI, are largely not industry specific so there needs to be a move to construct relevant CSR guidelines that target issues pertaining to the pharmaceutical industry. There should also be a focus on impact-orientated CSR guidelines, as opposed to simple reportability, in order to promote more meaningful CSR initiatives.