Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been defined in a number of ways, reflecting both the wide range of issues that CSR can apply to, and the particular angle from which various agencies, sectors and governments may have approached finding a suitable response.
For a full definition and analysis of this range, the Wikipedia page on the subject (HERE) is quite useful - but very long, reflecting both the range and the inherent contentiousness of some of the discussion. For these purposes we will pick out only the introduction (dated: July 2023):
"Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate social impact is a form of international private business self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature by engaging in, with, or supporting professional service volunteering through pro bono programs, community development, administering monetary grants to non-profit organizations for the public benefit, or to conduct ethically oriented business and investment practices."
".....various companies have pledged to go beyond that or have been mandated or incentivized by governments to have a better impact on the surrounding community. In addition national and international standards, laws, and business models have been developed to facilitate and incentivize this phenomenon."
Corporate social responsibility as a 'complex need'
The PIEs concept, and later the more detailed frameworks of PIEs One and PIEs 2.0, arose in the context of services attempting to respond constructively to the complex needs of more vulnerable individuals. In discussions within the PIElink community from approx 2020 onwards it became increasingly evident that partnership and collaboration between different service to meet these complex needs was itself a complex need (HERE).
As the idea was taken up by a wider range of agencies and sectors, there were discussions on the extent to which the PIEs concept applied to a wider range of environments (HERE, HERE and HERE). The definition above of CSR suggests that the social (and ecological) responsibility of businesses is just as complex an environment; but on a far larger scale.
The extent to which the PIEs approach may also be applicable on this larger canvas raises many questions that we have only begun to explore.
One thing we can say with confidence, though, is that the 'psychological model' that underlies the commissioning approach of 'New Public Management', as applies in welfare and education services, is wholly inadequate for any understanding of the motivations and morale of staff. For a (quite scathing) critique of NPM, the Human Learning Systems papers (HERE) are a useful place to start.
Any new technology, whether it be the analytic framework of PIEs 2.0 or the services audit approach of the Pizazz, is inevitably contrasted to and 'disruptive' of such a dysfunctional model.
