Integrated Management System Frameworks for Corporate Social Responsibility and Related Concepts

Although integrated management system (IMS) is known as an approach that can systematically and progressively integrate requirements of multiple stakeholders into the business processes, there is surprisingly a dearth of research on the adoption of this approach for the implementation and integration of stakeholder oriented concepts such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its related concepts, namely corporate sustainability (CS) or sustainable development (SD). This literature review is intended to support future research on this topic by providing a comprehensive overview of the past research on IMS frameworks that were developed for CSR and CS/SD as well as an analysis of twelve different IMS frameworks for the implementation, integration and management of these concepts. Although CSR and CS/SD are concepts that are often used synonymously, different approaches were adopted for the implementation of both concepts. Our analysis of the frameworks revealed that there is a tendency to adopt only specific international standards such as SA 8000, ISO 26000 or AA 1000 in the IMS approaches for the implementation of CSR. However, in the case of CS/SD, a combination of different management systems standards (MSSs) was incorporated into the IMS approaches for the implemention of the three dimensions of CS/SD.