Over the last three decades, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a key topic both in scholarly research and in business practice. However, the way how such kind of social responsibility is ‘conducted’ in the business world is based on a wrong understanding of ethics and has distracted from the original intention of the CSR debate. CSR has become a managerial discipline based on an instrumental logic. As we will outline in our contribution, at least three developments deserve critical attention in this context: (1) A strict orientation towards predefined standards, (2) following a pure governance logic when implementing CSR and (3) using CSR as a means for the symbolic adoption of responsibility.