Beyond CSR: organisational learning for global responsibility

Abstract

This contribution argues that it is time to move beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) to ‘global responsibility.’ As long as the field retains its old label, the learning agenda for organisations will be too narrow to address the full range of challenges for a sustainable world. It sets too small a stage, invites too few actors to participate and restricts the types of roles they can play. Global responsibility reframes the way issues are defined and the paths along which solutions may be found. After building the argument for the term, the contribution draws on research about organisational learning to identify the kinds of learning that organisations must become skilled at in order to tackle global responsibility. It then illustrates learning processes in a co-operative bank and an international non-governmental association, a multinational corporation, and a multi stakeholder platform created by the United Nations. These cases show how organisations are combining various types of learning and using physical and virtual learning spaces to generate knowledge for action. The contribution concludes by discussing how to increase the number of organisations engaging in such global responsibility and how to speed up their learning. To this end, lessons are drawn from experiences with the diffusion of voluntary and mandatory approaches to corporate social reporting over the past forty years.