CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 428Corporate Social Responsibility and SustainabilityCorporate Social Responsibility ReportingEthics in Business and Education

The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business

Open access
Visser, Wayne·2010·Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics
DOI 10.15209/jbsge.v5i3.185
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

This paper argues that CSR, as a business, governance and ethics system, has failed. This assumes that success or failure is measured in terms of the net impact (positive or negative) of business on society and the environment. The paper contends that a different kind of CSR is needed if we are to reverse the current direction of many of the world’s most pressing social, environmental and ethical trends. The first part of the paper reviews business’s historical progress over the Ages and Stages of CSR: moving through the Ages of Greed, Philanthropy, Marketing and Management, using defensive, charitable, promotional and strategic CSR approaches respectively. The second part of the paper examines the Three Curses of Modern CSR (incremental, peripheral and uneconomic), before exploring what CSR might look like in an emerging Age of Responsibility. This new CSR – called systemic or radical CSR, or CSR 2.0 – is based on five principles (creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity) and forms the basis for a new DNA model of responsible business, built around the four elements of value creation, good governance, societal contribution and environmental integrity.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.15209/jbsge.v5i3.185

Cites

24 of 24 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • AI continues to gain in complexity and sophistication, offering tremendous benefits in terms of efficiency and innovation.

    “AI continues to 'gain in complexity and sophistication', 151 offering tremendous benefits in terms of efficiency and innovation.”

    From Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Decisions (2023) · cites this paper as [151]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Elkington, J. 1994. Towards the Sustainable Corporation: Win-Win-Win Strategies for Sustainable Development. California Management Review, 36(2): 90-100.
  2. Semler, R., 1989. Managing without managers. Harvard Business Review, September.
  3. Visser, W., 2011. The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. London: Wiley.
  4. Wood, D.J. 1991, Corporate social performance revisited. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 16, pp. 691-718.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Visser, W.
Affiliations
University of Birmingham (GB)
Corresponding author
Visser, Wayne
Venue
Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics
Publisher
Victoria University
Published
2010-11-01
Volume
5
Issue
3
ISSN
1833-4318 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.15209/jbsge.v5i3.185
OpenAlex
W2003203950
Cited by
428
References
24
Citations by year
2026: 13 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 41 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 38 · 2020: 31 · 2019: 40 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 37 · 2016: 37 · 2015: 22 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 16
FWCI
27.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Journal of Business Systems Governance & Ethics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Ethics in Business and Education
Keywords
corporate social responsibility, CSR 2.0, history of CSR, corporate governance, business ethics, value creation, environmental integrity, social contribution, glocality, circularity, scalability, responsiveness, creativity

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review