ABSTRACT
Business in the Community (BITC) is one of the oldest and largest of the national business-led corporate responsibility coalitions. It began as a broker. In retrospect, BITC has benefited from a British business culture somewhere between the continental European social model and US free-market voluntarism. Globalization is now producing a convergence in these very different models of capitalism, but the UK's early adoption of responsible business ideas reflects the prevailing UK business culture. Cockburn's Business Impact Task Force helped to generate a common understanding among several of the world's business-led coalitions promoting corporate responsibility such as BITC, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Europe that business impacts should be measured with respect to four dimensions: marketplace, workplace, environment and community. There are now three broad dimensions to BITC's work: leadership; account management; and the ability to scale engagement.
