Why corporate social responsibility is not yet transformative? A philosophical clarification

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility aims to contribute to sustainable development and social welfare, but initiatives are little transformative of inequitable and unsustainable economic and social structures. The philosophical origin of this inefficiency is in the reduction of social responsibility to a desocialized and depoliticized moral responsibility, which only promotes good practices of each organization in a lonely way, or a strictly legal approach to the responsibility that seeks to impose new rules to the companies. Both reductions fail to understand the eminently collective nature of a responsibility for social impacts, which would demand inter-organizational associations to relieve systemic challenges, based on territorialized learning communities. The true “social”, plural and mutual responsibility, is still missing.