| dc.description.abstract | Enterprises are showing increased interest in developing their corporate social responsibility (CSR). Nowadays, many businesses do not need to be convinced of the ethical and business value of CSR; the issue is rather how to integrate CSR into their organization.
The goal of this study is to design a method that assists organizations with fully integrating CSR in the organization. This is structured according to the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle and contains 11 activities and their corresponding in- and outputs. Furthermore, the method is supported by best practices, some of which contain enterprise architecture models to illustrate the different recommendations.
At the foundation of this study lie three research activities: 1) a literature study on CSR, CSR integration, and ICT for CSR, 2) a content analysis on publicly available documents, and 3) interviews with socially responsible organizations and sustainability consultants. The results of all these activities were used to build the CSR integration method. The CSR integration method was validated with the interview participants and additional experts. Overall, the respondents were positive about the method.
This study is carried out as part of the Business Informatics master’s program, which is in the Information Science (IS) domain. While CSR does not seem to fit within the IS domain, this study demonstrates that IS practices can be applied in other disciplines, thereby helping to approach challenges in different fields.
In fact, this study has opened up a sub-research line that utilizes IS practices to study CSR integration. Examples of future projects (i.e. Information Science research projects or Business Informatics theses) are: investigating other ways to present the CSR integration method, investigate in more detail the closed concepts of the PDD – e.g. what would an integrated ICT infrastructure look like in practice? -, perform a content analysis to uncover all the different systems for CSR that companies currently use, or make a first attempt at building a best practice repository. | |
