Corporate social responsibility (CSR) term as we have known right now has been introduced firstly in the 1950s with the publication of a book entitled Social Responsibilities of the Businessman by Howard R. Bowen (Beal, 2014; KPMG. 2011). Since then so many definitions of the term have been developed by academicians, practitioners, and organizations (like GRI) with their own perspectives. Therefore, it seems that corporate social responsibility is a field of study, rather than a specific term with single meaning. As a field of study it can be closely related to other terms: sustainability, governance, and accountability. Crowther and Aras (2008), for example, provide the principle of CSR as having three elements: sustainability, accountability, and transparency. In addition, Gill (2008) tried to make CSR and governance as the closely related two terms, in that corporate governance is a reflection of corporate social responsibility and CSR is one form of corporate governance. Other terms often considered as synonymous of CSR are corporate sustainable performance, corporate citizen and corporate social performance (Beal 2014; Fauzi, Svensen, and Rahman, 2010). Even the terns such as social and environmental accounting (SEA) and green accounting are closely related to the CSR (Brown and Fraser, 2006); Cho and Patten, 2013).
