Bestselling Corporate Responsibility Books

Five maturity stages of CR

Simon Zadek provides a useful best practice five-stage maturity model of how organizations deal with CR (HBR Dec04 - 'The Path to CR')

1. Defensive: deny practices, outcomes or responsibilites ("It's not our job to fix that")
2. Compliance: adopt a policy-based compliance approach as a cost of doing business ("We'll do just as much as we have to")
3. Managerial: embed the societal issue into core management processes ("It's the business, stupid")
4. Strategic: integrate the societal issue into core business processes ("It gives us a competetive edge")
5. Civil: promote broad industry participation in CR ("We need to make sure everybody does it")