A General Overview of the Field of Internal Social Responsibility within Sustainability

Abstract

More and more companies and institutions claim day by day to be committed to sustainability, a multidisciplinary concept comprising social, environmental, and economic issues, as well as directly reflected in terms of people’s welfare, quality of life and security. As a result, sustainability appears as a concept closely linked to social responsibility – or to corporate social responsibility in case of organizations – and, consequently, as a very difficult concept to be concisely defined. In this sense, and even when sustainability involves both internal and external dimensions, most sustainable policies and actions have been – and still are – aimed at external target audiences. Meanwhile, evidence of the incorporation of sustainable and responsible principles into internal management in organizations are not so common, even when this same evidence also shows that most effective external actions are supported by the prior commitment of employees to responsibility and sustainability (just as in case of internal marketing or internal corporate social responsibility regarding their external counterparts). Similarly, the content of the contributions in the academic literature has been mostly devoted to the external aspects of corporate responsibility and sustainability and – although an increasing number – a few of them have focused on their internal dimensions, then suggesting that there is still much to be done. On the above, once approached the concepts of internal marketing and internal social responsibility, and based on the academic literature, this paper aims to analyse the relationship between corporate social responsibility and human resource management. Then, with an exploratory purpose, a first and general overview about the number of contributions published in the field is intended, as well as about the way in which academic literature discusses and analyses how sustainable principles are being adopted in human resource management in organizations. This way, using the publications included in the Google Scholar database as a reference, we can conclude a preliminary idea of how this topic has been contributing and can contribute in the near future (reinforced by the current relevance of the UN Sustainable Development Goals – and specifically the SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth –) to the achievement of successful sustainable practices, as a starting point for further research and developments.