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Strategic CSR & Social Accounting
Toyota: A Transitioned Company
Toyota Motor Corporation is a corporation that seeks to change the world of driving by not just meeting and exceeding customer demands but by creating vehicles that enrich lives and respect the environment as a whole. Their corporate philosophy includes respect for:
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Law
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Others
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Natural Environment
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Customers
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Employees.
Although it may seem as if its primary focus is sustainability due to their reputation and self-presentation, their CSR too goes far beyond only sustainability.
Toyota has managed to go beyond CSR by using strategy to create opportunity, competitive advantage, and innovation rather than merely a charitable deed, cost, or constraint while promoting a better society for all. It is an excellent example for demonstrating shared value. Instead of using ethics, reputation, sustainability, and license to operate as arguments that focus on the tensions between business and society, Toyota has managed to use them strategically by focusing on the interdependence between business and society. By incorporating these inside-out and outside-in linkages, it has accomplished strategic CSR, which is further detailed below.
Addressing Social Issues
Toyota is another one of the few corporations that publish sustainability reports. The company’s 2012 sustainability report details prior year objectives, current plan for environmental stewardship, and the impacts of actions taken and operations. Like NiSource, Toyota:
- Promotes sustainability;
- Attempts to fulfill moral obligation;
- Has the license to operate;
- Has a good reputation.
Toyota has 3 pillars of social contribution activities: youth development, environmental protection/nature conservation, and social welfare. Toyota’s actions clearly display a prioritization of social issues as well as setting the company’s objectives with social expectations while unequivocally prioritizing and meeting business goals.
Corporate Social Agenda

Toyota uses a balanced, forward-looking strategy that includes long-term modernization and reformation of their products, stakeholder engagement, and community involvements to progress toward its vision. Its vision is to lead the way to the future of mobility. This goes beyond meeting society’s expectations to opportunities that can accomplish both social and economic benefits and does more than ease potential harms by finding different ways to meet its strategy through advancing social conditions. It will continue to utilize its value chain to make social impacts. However, Toyota will continue to excel beyond Responsive CSR practices.
Toyota has chosen a focus in sustainability as its unique position since its operations are more closely associated with that (cars and emissions), which allows them to have better opportunity to leverage its resources to promote a better society. Choosing this position allows Toyota to choose a small number of initiatives that result in epic benefits for both business and society that are large and distinctive. The company continues to move toward making it difficult to establish the difference between its day-to-day operations and CSR; it has added a social dimension to its value proposition.