Convergent social responsibility as the key to corporate strategic success

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to increase corporate social responsibility (CSR), including business acting in an ethical and transparent way, through the prism of strategic conversation with applying the author’s convergent methodology that ensures the integrity, purposefulness and sustainability of development of corporations in the external environment. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is based on the integration of following approaches and methods: international CSR standards, strategic planning, networked virtual collaboration, group cognitive (conceptual) modelling, inverse problem-solving in topological spaces, categories theory, control thermodynamics, big data analysis for cognitive models verification and quantum semantic approach. Findings The convergent methodology helps to visualize the strategic situation in a corporation and gives more chances to get a clear feeling for every employee that his or her social responsibility helps to achieve not only his or her own goals but the goals of the company. This approach helps to accelerate the raising of the level of CSR. Research limitations/implications The strategic situation for raising the level of CSR has to be represented during strategic conversations. The strategic process should cover all the employees of the corporation. Groups can be hierarchically organized. The number of participants of one group can be about 35, and the duration of one conversation is up to 5 hours. Practical implications The convergent methodology was applied many times for creating a high-level CSR atmosphere by the collective building of companies’ strategies. Social implications The convergent approach provides proactive identification of adverse effects of the external environment on the level of CSR and prevention of such impacts. The approach also provides acceleration of corporate strategic planning, processes of network democracy and group decision-making processes. Originality/value The main developing problem, which is beyond the state of the art, is that the CSR situation cannot be described in a clear, logical and formalised way, and a traditional computer model cannot be created for this case with formalised approach. The proposed convergent methodology with cognitive modelling helps to do it.