Investigating the Evolution of the Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility and Developing Inductive Scenarios

Reviewing the history shows that corporate social responsibility started from an embryonic concept and grew over time and affected the identity of organizations, but there are still conflicting opinions about the dialectic between organization and society in the theoretical and strategic climate of organizations. In this article, for a better understanding of the history of social responsibility, a semi-structured literature review was conducted to have a big picture of the evolution of this concept over time. Then, according to the frequency of concepts in key articles, three main drivers of the domain of corporate social responsibility that can change the organizations in the future were identified. The main drivers are “inequality”, “climate change”, and “gender gap”. In the next step, we tried to present a picture of the dialectic between organization and society in the literature of this field by drawing causal diagrams between these drivers and other organizational and social variables. In the last step, according to these three drivers, inductive-normative scenarios of the future of the organization's social responsibility were presented. These scenarios include “egalitarian organizations”, “the biophilic organization”, and “gender-discriminiation-free organizations”.