Social responsability and ethics

Thanks to the undeniable and universal success of ISO 26000:2010 (described in paragraph 1 of this article), social responsibility is nowadays at the heart of a large number of social and environmental improvement initiatives within many organizations.

The term "organization" is to be understood here as defined in paragraph 2.12 of ISO 26000:2010: "an entity or group of people and facilities, structured on the basis of responsibilities, authorities and relationships, and having identifiable objectives". This is how organizations of all kinds, public and private, and local authorities have adopted the fundamentals of the standard, generally with great dynamism and success.

The terms CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and OSR (Organizational Social Responsibility), which were used in the past and are still used in many presentations, should no longer be used. Today, it's better to talk about SR (social responsibility) "tout court", since this approach is no longer reserved exclusively for companies, but is open to communities and non-governmental organizations, for example.

ISO 26000:2010 – Guidance on social responsibility was published at the end of 2010. As stated in the foreword to the standard: "This International Standard has been developed using a multi-stakeholder approach, with the participation of experts from over ninety countries and forty international or regionally based organizations, covering different aspects of social responsibility. These experts came from six different stakeholder groups: consumers, public authorities, industry, workers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and services, consulting, research, education and others.

This multi-stakeholder approach is a major first in the world of international standardization, until now considered the preserve of the industrial world. And it is probably also the reason for the undeniable success of this standard.

Let's turn to ethics for a moment.

Ethics - or at least ethical behaviour, as ISO 26000:2010 has taken the concept to mean - is one of the seven action areas covered by this standard (§ 2 ).

Ethical behavior is often at the center of the news, and words like corruption, fraud, etc., flourish in the media and are nowadays at the heart of a...