Corporate Social Responsibility: A Conceptual Model

Abstract

In parallel to the twofold interest of practitioners and policy makers CSR research has been proliferated with the studies that explore its meaning and multifaceted nature since the 1950s.Despite its increasing importance and wide recognition however there is no consensus on the definition of CSR. This chapter starts with a critical discussion on how the concept varies over time across context and among different perspectives and research goals. Then it aims to discover the vague meaning of CSR by viewing it as a social innovation as well as the drivers of other social innovations and to analyze its nature and structure from the analytic perspective of the systems theory. The proposed approach can help both researchers and practitioners to capture the dynamic and idiosyncratic nature of CSR over time across contexts and among perspectives. © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.