The concept of CSR remains fragile on the theoretical level. Prisoner of a persistent ambiguity, he struggles to provide evidence of its relevance. Observation of practices claimed by many companies brings us to propose a reading frame for interpreting the dynamics of social and environmental innovation. Therefore, this article proposes the frame of an ' incompressible CSR', reflecting what appears to be unavoidable in practice. Far from a purely generous view, but without denying the existence of social and environmental responsibilities of the company, this framework seeks to isolate, such as minimum degree of social and environmental responsibility that the company can not but agree, on pain of undermining its economic performance. Thus the social and environmental dimensions are reinstated in a 'proportionate' point in the choice of production, alongside the economic dimension that is no longer considered to be watertight but partly dependent of the interactions between business and society. While seeking to increase the acuity of reading the concept of CSR, the proposed interpretive framework suggests an approach that may help practitioners in the operational definition and assessment of a CSR policy.
