Beyond CSR: Organizational learning for global responsibility

This article first outlines the logic for "global responsibility," then it discusses the organisational learning implications of taking the concept seriously and provides several illustrations of learning processes that different organisations have experienced. In so doing, this article illustrates the fruitfulness of learning from different theories and from different actors in the field, a strategy that is increasingly called for by researchers and experts. The article then addresses the question of how to speed up organisational learning for global responsibility beyond the limited number of early innovators. To this end it builds on lessons learned from experiences in different countries over the past four decades with voluntary and mandatory approaches to corporate social reporting. From this analysis of related initiatives, conclusions are drawn for the specification of key criteria for a framework for global responsibility and supporting processes. At a time when practitioners stress that "corporate social responsibility is an ongoing learning process for companies and stakeholders," academics are criticising theories of corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance for being too static.