The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is associated with the idea that every organization should integrate environmental, economic and social issues as part of their organizational philosophy. In companies with a higher degree of development in terms of CSR, sustainable practices are integrated into management systems. When focusing on Latin America, this integration may be at its first steps, but there is a vacuum in the literature in this field. Based on this reality, this paper aims to evaluate the integration between CSR practices and management systems in companies in Brazil based on experts’ perceptions. Employing a conceptual model covering how stakeholder demands are incorporated in organizational practices using a continuous improvement approach, we performed a survey with experts in the area. Results revealed opportunities for improvements in all CSR practices evaluated, most of which were considered by the experts to have been implemented only superficially. In a comparative analysis, two practices stood out in relation to the others: reporting of CSR results to stakeholders and evaluation of the performance of CSR activities using pre-established indicators. Practices associated with planning of CSR activities are the most superficially implemented, adversely affecting CSR performance. The authors believe that the findings of this study could be useful for business managers and academics as guidance towards improved CSR efforts.

INTRODUCTION

There has been a change in the paradigm governing the objectives of businesses during recent decades. In his famous article in the New York Times Magazine in 1970, Milton Friedman argued that the main objective of a business was to maximize its profits and that the only restriction imposed on the business was the need to obey the law (Friedman, 1970; Scott and Davis, 2015). However, this scenario has changed over the last decades, and organizations are now obliged to achieve social and environmental objectives in order to satisfy the interests of all involved parties and ensure the organization’s long-term survival (García-Rodríguez et al., 2013; Mota et al., 2015; Galeazzo and Klassen, 2015). Quairel-Lanoizelée (2011) and Helleno et al. (2017) confirm this new scenario and note that organizations must evaluate the economic, social and environmental impacts of all their activities. In this scenario emerges the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The European Commission (2011, n.d.) defines CSR as “the concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis”. According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2007), CSR can be defined as “the overall contribution of business to sustainable development”. Sprinkle and Maines (2010) argue that CSR practices can provide many benefits to organizations, such as: improvement in the image of the organization, greater employee motivation, better degree of communication with all stakeholders, reduction in the consumption of materials and energy, among others. According to Cramer (2005), despite the many benefits reported in the literature for organizations that adopt CSR, there is still a lack of information on how to implement a structured approach toward CSR. Many studies have investigated the possibility of using an integrated management system (IMS) to implement CSR practices, as IMS has been deployed by various organizations with different levels of success (Mežinska et al., 2015). According to Jørgensen et al. (2006), integration has more characteristics than mere simple alignment.