Social Responsibility: A Crucial Knowledge and Ethics

Both the economic practice and education in the decades after the 2nd world war continued the previous trend toward over-specialization resulting from the huge amounts of knowledge piled up. But both the global impact and the local action require linking of specialists in interdisciplinary creative cooperation for their work processes to succeed. ‘Division of work’ was much more stressed than ‘coordination’ and ‘cooperation’ and still is so. Oversights result with consequences reaching all way to global crises, including world wars. Systems and cybernetic theories have offered remedies in some of their many versions, including the knowledge systems science, but with a poor acceptance on the part of over-specialists and bosses. In the recent decade a new remedy has been offered under the label of social responsibility. Data from USA, Germany, etc., show that customers are increasingly embracing it. This makes this invention start becoming a crucial non-technological innovation, which shall enter the economic practice and education quickly. It shall not tackle organizations only, but become a human attribute of all influential persons and their organizations from family to the entire world. Zdenka Zenko University of Maribor, Slovenia Anita Hrast University of Maribor, Slovenia Tjasa Strukelj University of Maribor, Slovenia