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Abstract
Social responsibility is a moral principle of an organization or individual engaging in activities in order to improve the lives of others in society. The aim of this article is to provide insights of the existing body of literature on individual social responsibility and identify the most important studies in the field. A review of the literature in the field based on the international databases search has been carried out and 7 papers have been analyzed. The investigation revealed that there is little increase in the relevance of this issue within academia, despite its growing importance in everyday life. The contribution of this paper is the elaboration of a framework of individual social responsibility by systematizing the findings of the publications within this theme.
Keywords: prosocial behaviour, responsibility of individual towards society, altruism
1.INTRODUCTION
Social responsibility has two branches: individual social responsibility and organizational social responsibility (private companies, public institutions, non-governmental entities, educational organizations).
Social responsibility is a moral principle of an entity that can be an organization or individual working to improve the lives of others in society (Bowes et al., 2001). Furthermore, it is a duty each company and individual should fulfil to maintain the balance between the environment and the economy. Their actions should lead to sustainable development in order to protect the interests of future generations on one hand and to meet the needs of the current population on the other hand.
Individual social responsibility (ISR) refers to the individual's perception of what he should do in order to help society. Organizational social responsibility takes into account the individual's perception of the role that organizations should play in society (Hatch and Stephen, 2015).
ISR represents the responsibility of each person for the activities he/she gets involved in. Moreover, it means that everyone has a moral responsibility to perform so that he/she should not affect the people around him/her (Park et al., 2009). Every individual should dedicate to supporting various social causes. He/she should not give importance to material things, but to focus on the welfare of others (Ecimovic et al., 2013). ISR could work only if the individual rises above his or her own interest and supports causes that will provide benefits to a large number of people. In...