Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

This issue of the RAD features three articles that focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR), particularly as it applies to the petroleum and gas industries in Russia. The first article describes the attitudes towards CSR by MBA students currently sponsored by the main oil and gas companies in the country. (Their views are seemingly shaped by a mixture of “Soviet” thinking, the tax evasion practiced in the 1990s, the current socio-political situation in Russia, and Western attitudes towards CSR.) The second article then compares the perception of petroleum-related CSR in Murmansk Oblast, where a large gas project was put on indefinite hold in 2012, with those of Nenets Autonomous Okrug, which has many decades of experience with petroleum initiatives. The last article uses economic research findings and ethnographic field results to determine how the people in the Komi Republic view the economic, environmental and social effects of local oil and gas projects.