This level of the CSR model is about the relationship between business and society at large and it has three major elements:

• Legitimate concerns of business as a social institution and it frames the analytical view of the interrelationship between business and society.
• Public responsibility concerns of the individual firm and its processes and outcomes within the framework of its own principles. 
• Managerial discretion whereby managers and other organisational members are moral actors. Within every domain of corporate social responsibility, they are obliged to exercise such discretion as is available to them, towards socially responsible outcomes.