Diversity and Dynamics of Social Responsibility

Theoretically, the subject of social responsibility has attracted much academic attention in recent years. In practice, Social Accountability International and the International Organization for Standardization, among others, have published relevant standards for verification or guidance. With such a world-wide movement of social responsibility and for an in-depth understanding of social responsibility, this paper attempts to characterize the total concept of social responsibility in terms of its nature and existence, its subject and attributes or properties, its scope and categories, its relations, and its changes in the perspective of social epistemology. It is concluded that social responsibility is of universality in terms of its nature and existence, its objectivity as an inherent capability of organizations, and its subjectivity as decisions and activities or a performance of organizations; of diversity due to organizational sectors, industrial divisions, corporate attributes, and corporate contexts for operations; of dynamics from the viewpoint of social responsibility maturity, corporate responses to social responsibility, organizational life cycle, and social and economic development level.