IELTS vocabulary: Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility turns up in Task 2 prompts asking whether companies have obligations beyond making money, in Part 3 discussions that follow almost any Part 2 cue card about work or a local business, and occasionally in General Training letters concerning a company's local impact. The trap most candidates fall into is treating the topic as a values question rather than a structural one — writing that companies "should give back to society" or "should care about the environment" without ever naming who decides this, how it's measured, or what happens when a company doesn't comply. An examiner scoring Lexical Resource is looking for the vocabulary of mechanism: who a company answers to, what a specific practice looks like, and what verifies a claim is genuine rather than convenient. This article works through that vocabulary in the shape an essay actually needs it, then shows how to combine several terms without the paragraph reading like a glossary entry.

Start with the actors and the underlying concept, since most weak essays never distinguish between the different parties a company might be accountable to. "Corporate social responsibility" itself refers to a company's voluntary efforts to operate ethically and benefit society beyond its core obligation to turn a profit. "Stakeholder" names anyone affected by a company's decisions — employees, customers, local residents, suppliers — a considerably broader group than "shareholder," which refers specifically to those who own a financial stake in the company and are owed a return on it. "Triple bottom line" is a genuinely useful framework term: it describes evaluating a company against three measures at once — profit, people, and planet — rather than financial performance alone, and naming it signals that an essay understands CSR as a measurable trade-off rather than a vague sentiment. "Corporate governance" refers to the internal system of rules, oversight, and decision-making structures that direct how a company is actually run, which is the structure CSR commitments have to operate inside rather than around.

A second group covers what responsible practice actually looks like day to day, since this is where an essay can move from asserting a company "should be ethical" to describing what that requires in practice. "Ethical business practices" is the general umbrella term, but a stronger essay reaches further: "fair labour standards" covers wages, working hours, and safety conditions that meet an accepted baseline, while "living wage" is a more precise term worth distinguishing from the legal minimum wage — a living wage is calculated to cover a reasonable standard of living in a specific location, and a company can pay above the legal minimum while still paying well below a living wage. "Supply chain transparency" means openly disclosing where and how a product's components are sourced and manufactured, which matters because a company's own direct labour practices can be exemplary while its suppliers' are not. "Code of conduct" refers to a company's own written standard for acceptable behaviour, frequently extended contractually to suppliers as a condition of doing business with them.