Social Responsibility of Organizations Directions of Changes. PN 387

Changes in different aspects of our life that we witness do not omit the corporate social responsibility (CSR) area. Thus, it is impossible to omit a new approach to defining the above-mentioned concept, initiated by the European Commission. The new definition of corporate social responsibility does not underline the voluntary way of taking part in social initiatives (“companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis” – COM (2006) 136), but directly indicates “the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society” (COM (2011) 681).

The change in defining the CSR concept can be related to Visser’s view of CSR. He defined CSR stages by applying IT nomenclature and using the 1.0 and 2.0 abbreviations (as CSR 1.0 and CSR 2.0) to determine the newer version of CSR and emphasizing a certain continuity with the previous one. He mentioned and described also the possible changes in the CSR area and defined five stages that are determined by the economic age of an enterprise.

Obviously, although the stages that Visser proposed have their logical continuity (age of greed, philanthropy, marketing, management and finally responsibility), it will not be easy in economic everyday practice to unequivocally identify the current level of development of CSR on a global scale. There are visible large development disparities even on the Polish territory, not to mention a larger scale.

Therefore, it is worth asking about the future directions of CSR development. The reference point (at least on the European scale) can be the renewed EU strategy 2011–14 for Corporate Social Responsibility. It mentions, among others, the need to enhance the visibility of CSR and disseminate good practices, improve and track levels of trust in business, improve company disclosure of social and environmental information, integrate CSR into education, training and research, emphasize the importance of national and sub-national CSR policies.

In response to such a task (especially in relation to the need for integrating CSR into education and research), I present with pleasure the Research Papers of Wrocław University of Economics, which is a set of Polish perspective on selected current and future problems in the area of CSR. At this point I wish to address my thanks to the reviewers of the Research Papers, whose efforts in the form of comments and suggestions expressed in the reviews contribute also a special part to the CSR discussion held on the pages of the current volume.

• social responsibility
• free market
• market society
• corporate social responsibility
• bankruptcy
• insolvency
• stakeholder theory
• social innovations
• development of organizations
• region development