Traceability in the context of corporate social responsibility

With the phenomenon of globalization, consumers around the world increasingly have access to new products. Globalization can be seen as a positive trend, but has also negative implications. Consumers can be exposed to potentially unsafe products coming from unknown markets and producers. Thus, one of the important features is to provide confidence to users by ensuring that products could be traced back using various traceability mechanisms. Moreover consumers are now not only interested in the origin of products, but also in the social and environmental aspects of the production of goods. This Bachelor thesis aims to show how social and environmental issues are influencing consumers and companies today and how traceability systems are currently used by companies, as well as to illustrate that in many cases companies’ social and environmental claims can not be validated or verified. It concludes by showing that traceability could be used not only for technical matters (i.e. ensuring products safety) but also in the context of social responsibility of companies.