Summary -The view on companies and organisations

Summary

• We spend a large part of our lives in organisations, i.e. in formal structures in which we pursue one or more purposes together with other people.

• Over the past ten to fifteen years, the term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become established as an umbrella term for the measures with which a company or organisation assumes general, social and ecological responsibility.

• The concept of core responsibility helps to determine the scope and therefore also the individual limits of an organisation's responsibility in order to be able to act in dynamic and complex environments.

• The call for and commitment to CSR could also be seen as a new way of looking at companies.

• Due to its origins, the term sustainability is associated with the aspect of the environment. However, as sustainable, future-proof development as a whole not only concerns the environment, but also encompasses social and economic dimensions. (This will be elaborated in more detail in the next learning unit 8)

• CSR has arrived in the mining sector and it can be assumed that the integrative connection between the two areas will increase and become closer.

• The core responsibility model provides company management with an instrument that can be used to determine both the scope and the resulting limits of responsibility for an individual company on a well-founded basis. By determining their specific core responsibility, companies are given a framework for their otherwise escalating responsibility.

• The act of balancing the attribution of responsibility to oneself and to others is an open-ended dynamic process that also depends on existing power relations.

• For the mining sector, the model of core responsibility is a call to actively participate in the social discourse at an early stage. Thanks to its specialist expertise and direct proximity to mining technologies with their potentials and risks, the mining sector can make profound expert contributions to an otherwise abstract discourse on responsibility.