(Re)discovering the Social Responsibility of Business in Germany

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a relatively recent addition to the agenda in Germany, although the country has a long history of companies practicing social responsibilities. The expectations of society had remained stable for many years, encapsulated in laws, societal norms, and industrial relations agreements. But the past decade has seen significant changes in Germany, challenging established ways of treating the role of business in society. This contribution reviews and illustrates the development of diverse forms of social responsibility in German corporations and analyzes how actors in business and society can build on traditional strengths to find new institutional arrangements for sharing tasks and responsibilities in the interests of achieving a better balance between societal, economic, and environmental needs.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Multi-Stakeholder Governance: Pluralism,Feminist Perspectives and Women’s NGOs

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature has increasingly explored relationships between civil society and social movements, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations, as well as the role of NGOs in multi-stakeholder governance processes. This paper addresses the challenge of including a plurality of civil society voices and perspectives in business–NGO relations, and in CSR as a process of governance. The paper contributes to CSR scholarship by bringing insights from feminist literature to bear on CSR as a process of governance, and engaging with leaders of women’s NGOs, a group of actors rarely included in CSR research. The issues raised inform contributions to the CSR literature relating to the role of women’s NGOs with regard to the gender equality practices and impacts of corporations, and with respect to defining the meaning and practice of CSR. The paper frames marginalized NGOs as important actors which can contribute to pluralism, inclusion and legitimacy in CSR as a process of governance. It identifies several key barriers to the participation of women’s NGOs in CSR, and concludes by making suggestions for future research, as well as practice.     

Constructing Illegitimacy? Cartels and Cartel Agreements in Finnish Business Media from Critical Discursive Perspective

During the last decade, any questionable or illegal behaviour on the part of businesses has received considerable attention in the media. Using a critical discursive perspective, we here investigate how the media constructs one type of questionable business as illegitimate. Our data draw upon articles dealing with cartels and cartel agreements in Finnish business media covering the five year period 2002–2007. Our contributions are following: We add to the current literature on CSR and national businesses, suggesting that regardless of globalization socio-cultural history plays an important role in constructing the illegitimacy of business practices. We therefore emphasize the importance of media as an arena where social actors construct the social contract between business and society. We further contribute to studies on questionable business by reconstructing a discursive framework used to construct cartels and cartel agreements.     

CSR and the Mediated Emergence of Strategic Ambiguity

We develop a framework for understanding how lack of clarity in business press coverage of corporate social responsibility functions as a mediated and emergent form of strategic ambiguity. Many stakeholders expect CSR to exhibit clarity, consistency, and discursive closure. But stakeholders also expect CSR to conform to varying degrees of both formal and substantive rationality. These diverse expectations conflict with each other and change over time. A content analysis of press coverage in Denmark suggests that the business media reflect and amplify the ambiguity generated by these shifting demands. We propose that this very public lack of discursive closure provides strategic advantages to CSR stakeholders by rendering the concept of CSR adaptable, resilient, and meaningful to diverse interests. From this perspective, strategic ambiguity emerges from a relational and mediated process, not from the direct intentions of individual stakeholders. Our framework suggests that CSR is best understood not as a clear or consistent agenda, but rather as a forum for sensemaking, diversity of opinion, and debate over the conflicting social norms and expectations attached to corporate activity.     

Modelling CSR: How Managers Understand the Responsibilities of Business Towards Society

The purpose of this article is to develop a model of how managers perceive the responsibilities of business towards society. The article is based on the survey responses of more than 1,000 managers in eight large international firms. It is concluded that the managerial perceptions of societal responsibilities differ in some respects from the mainstream models found in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics literature. The article is an output of RESPONSE: an EU- and corporate-funded research project on managerial perceptions of CSR.     

Firm–Employee Relationships from a Social Responsibility Perspective: Developments from Communist Thinking to Market Ideology in Romania. A Mass Media Story

Firm–employee relationships are dependent on the wider societal context and on the role business plays in society. Changes in institutional arrangements in society affect the perceived responsibilities of firms to their personnel. In this study, we examine mass media discussions about firm–employee relationships from a social responsibility perspective via a longitudinal study in Romanian society. Our analysis indicates how the expected responsibilities of firms towards employees have altered with the changing role of firms in society since the early 1990s. These transformations correspond to the ideological developments, from communist to market-based thinking, which have taken place in post-communist Eastern Europe. More specifically, our study shows how the diminishing expectations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are linked in mass media to increasingly important talk of human resource management (HRM). HRM is a modern business approach believed to address personnel needs and organisational objectives simultaneously. The congruency of goals in HRM may mistakenly lead to the conclusion that organisations are inherently responsible toward their personnel. We argue that this may not necessarily be the case. HRM, matching well the new free-market ideology in post-communist Eastern Europe, was eagerly embraced in that it defined firm–personnel relationships. In this study, we question whether this was an adequate theoretical perspective for Romanian firms to adopt as it lacks sufficient ethical grounding. We also call for a higher awareness concerning the role of mass media in the management literature, since its current role in constructing the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ in firm–personnel relationships is hardly considered.     

Reconciling CSR with the Role of the Corporation in Welfare States: The Problematic Swedish Example

This article uses the Swedish example to illustrate how corporate social responsibility (CSR) is understood and interpreted when it enters a welfare state context where social issues have traditionally been the domains of the state and of politicians. Among the implications one finds a relative scepticism of traditionally strong actors on the labour market, such as the state, trade unions and employers. This relative scepticism is primarily explained by an enduring idea of the role of business in society which stands in contradistinction to the idea expressed in the corporate centred idea of CSR. Still, CSR gains a foothold in the welfare state context, mainly because of the flexibility of the concept which allows for ‘escape routes’ – an understanding of CSR that focusses on issues at arm’s length from the traditional welfare context. CSR also benefits from being codified in soft regulation, thereby becoming a legitimate super- national point of reference for all relevant actors. The possibility of developing new global arenas for espousing ideals partly in conflict with traditional ones also explains why CSR has become an established concept. In Sweden, such arenas have been created through the activities of multinational corporations, NGOs, investors, the media, consultants and other actors.     

CSR politics of non‐recognition: Justification fallacies marginalising criticism,society, and environment

Business is frequently criticized for not taking social and environmental responsibility. Large companies respond with CSR activities and some also with formulating justifications for their actions. This could indicate that business opens up to the criticism. I do, however, not observe such openness in the current study, but how companies use “CSR justifications” to fend off criticism. While companies use justifications as tool for creating legitimacy, I distinguish five justification fallacies. These failures in dealing with criticism cause a marginalisation of criticism, society, and environment. The fallacies found are neglecting criticism, shareholder primacy, organisation‐centricity, conflict avoidance, and progressivism. I contribute to the use of Habermasian ethics in the business ethics literature by showing how CSR justifications could play a part in a rational discourse. The concept justification fallacy, and the five fallacies can provide a framework for analysing corporate rhetoric more generally. Managers have fundamental difficulties in handling ethics and do not reflect on their reasons for working with CSR. They should be more careful when formulating justifications. In our situation of increasing affective polarisation, business needs to be more constructive than merely to marginalise criticism.     

Dealing With Uncertainties When Governing CSR Policies

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union. Jan Lepoutre is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics at Ghent University, Belgium. In his dissertation, he focuses on the competences associated with small business social responsibility and networks as governmental means to build competences among small businesses. Nikolay A. Dentchev is an independent research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, and a project coordinator at the corporate venturing department of Fortis Group (Fortis Venturing). He holds a Ph.D. in business economics from Ghent University. His current research is related to entrepreneurship, instrumental stakeholder theory, and management challenges of corporate social responsibility. Aimé Heene is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches strategic management for private and public organizations and currently focuses his research on (competencebased) management in public and social profit organizations.     

Executive Pay and Legitimacy: Changing Discursive Battles Over the Morality of Excessive Manager Compensation

How is the (il)legitimacy of manager compensation constructed in social interaction? This study investigated discursive processes through which heavily contested executive pay schemes of the Finnish energy giant Fortum were constructed as (il)legitimate in public during 2005–2009. The critical discursive analysis of media texts identified five legitimation strategies through which politicians, journalists, and other social actors contested these schemes and, at the same time, constructed subject positions for managers, politicians, and citizens. The comparison of two debate periods surrounding the 2007–2008 financial crisis revealed significant differences in the discursive strategies and the corresponding moral struggles linked to legitimation of executive compensation. The analysis highlights a change in moral reasoning by social actors as they adapt their justifications to a changing social context. This study has important implications for our understanding of the ethical aspects and socio-political embeddedness of manager compensation. In particular, it adds to our knowledge of organizational legitimacy by showing how discursive strategies and the corresponding morality constructions used to (de)legitimate business activities can shift quickly as a result of a change in the social and political climate surrounding the legitimation struggle.     

A reluctant stakeholder? On the perception of corporate social responsibility among European trade unions

Seen from a national business system perspective, the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerges as a specifically US‐American response to challenges regarding the corporate place in society. With the spread of American capitalism, however, CSR is bound to come into contact – and conflict – with other approaches to the role of business in society that have been shaped by different national cultures. Within Europe, one such area of potential conflict concerns the role of organised labour in representing employee interests. Studying the perceptions held by European trade unions on stakeholding, as one of the important concepts in the CSR discourse, does indeed reveal a considerable degree of union scepticism of CSR and its terminology. There is, however, also embryonic evidence of at least some unions attempting to link the CSR discourse to traditional union goals. Furthermore, national differences in union responses to CSR are beginning to emerge, which may, in turn, further shape the evolution of national business systems in Europe.     

"Business Responsibilities in a Divided World": The Cold War Roots of the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

Both business executives and management scholars have, in recentyears, focused a great deal of attention on the theme of corporatesocial responsibility (CSR). Calls for business leaders to expendresources on behalf of "social good" tend to downplay, if notignore, what is fundamentally an ideological question: justwhat is a "good" society and who defines "goodness"? The ideologicalunderpinnings of social responsibility and its relationshipto the "good" society can be explored through an historicalperspective. The roots of the CSR movement trace back to theearly years of the Cold War. Led by Donald K David, Dean ofthe Harvard Business School and supported by other academicsand executives given voice on the pages of the Harvard BusinessReview, advocates urged expanded business social responsibilityas a means of aligning business interests with the defense offree-market capitalism against what was depicted as the clear-and-presentdanger of Soviet Communism. Today's enthusiastic calls for businessto "do well by doing good" could benefit from a similar criticalanalysis not just of the goals of CSR but also the ideologicalassumptions, often unacknowledged, that underlie those goals.     

The Micro-level Foundations and Dynamics of Political Corporate Social Responsibility: Hegemony and Passive Revolution through Civil Society

Exploration of the political roles firms play in society is a flourishing stream within corporate social responsibility (CSR) research. However, few empirical studies have examined multiple levels of political CSR at the same time from a critical perspective. We explore both how the motivations of managers and internal organizational practices affect a company’s choice between competing CSR approaches, and how the different CSR programs of corporate and civil society actors compete with each other. We present a qualitative interpretative case study of how a French children’s clothing retailer develops CSR practices in response to accusations of poor working conditions and child labor in its supply chain. The company’s CSR approach consists of superficial practices, such as supplier audits by a cooperative business-organized nongovernmental organization (NGO) and philanthropic activities, which enable managers to silence more radical alternative models defended by other NGOs, activists, and trade unions. By this approach, the core business model based on exploitative low-cost country sourcing remains intact through self-regulated CSR. Through the case study, we develop a framework of dynamism in competing CSR programs. We discuss the implications of our study for CSR researchers, company managers, and policy makers.     

Construction of owner–manager identity in corporate social responsibility discourse

This article examines the different discursive resources on which small business owner–managers draw when understanding their sense of self in relation to corporate social responsibility. In the small business context, identity provides a justifiable framework to study corporate social responsibility, as decisions regarding socially responsible activities are mainly taken by managers and stem from their sense of who they are in the world. On the basis of 25 thematic interviews with owner–managers, two broad discursive resources were found that describe how they actively seek to create and legitimise their sense of self within the discussion on corporate social responsibility. These discursive resources are called being altruistic and being instrumental. The findings emphasise that the essential and also the most challenging feature in small business owner–managers' identity work is the process of reconciling economic values with the social and ethical aspects of business life.     

Between Profit-Seeking and Prosociality: Corporate Social Responsibility as Derridean Supplement

This article revolves around the debate surrounding the lack of a coherent definition for corporate social responsibility (CSR). I make use of Jacques Derrida’s theorizing on contested meaning to argue that CSR’s ambiguity is actually necessary in light of its functional role as a “supplement” to corporate profit-seeking. As a discourse that refuses to conclusively resolve the tension between profit-seeking and prosociality, CSR expresses an important critical perspective which demands that firms act responsibly, while retaining the overall corporate frame of shareholder supremacy. CSR does this by ambivalently affirming both profit-seeking and prosociality, a necessary contradiction. Attempts to reduce CSR’s ambiguity can thus only succeed by undermining its viability as a normative discourse that captures how certain elements of society understand how firms should act. The analysis suggests that greater scholarly attention is needed with regard to the material discursive environments within which discourses such as CSR are deployed. A discursive approach to research could thus benefit future practitioners, who have to act according to fluid standards of responsibility that cannot be authoritatively defined, but which can be better understood than they are at present.     

Trends and Drivers in CSR Disclosure: A Focus on Reporting Practices in the Automotive Industry

This work focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure practices of multinational corporations. Based on a longitudinal study of CSR reports of companies operating in the automotive industry, the paper offers a detailed study of how disclosure practices are changing and which principles and approaches influence and drive the development of such disclosure. Based on a four-year report-based study, the findings enable us to identify three main trends in the CSR disclosure strategy of automotive firms. First, in line with the mainstream CSR literature, the present study confirms the trend towards the increasing environmental and social accountability. Second, it adds evidence to the emerging debate regarding the harmonization and standardization of reporting and discusses this aspect by mentioning the standards as exerting some normative pressures within the sector. Finally, it provides evidence on specific links emerging between issues and actors. The implications of this evidence contribute to opening up the debate on CSR disclosure to the possibility of combining the institutional lens with a strategic approach that captures the materiality considerations of CSR disclosure.     

Constructing gender identity through masculinity in CSR reports: The South Korean case

Drawing on the themes of men and masculinity, this article examines texts in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of local multinational enterprises (MNEs) in South Korea, an emerging economy. This article explores how Korean male hegemony is hidden and naturalized in CSR reporting. Focusing on the discursive construction of gender identity, we analyze how CSR reports portray gendered identities in ways that may foster gender inequality by examining how the texts reflect the inferior position of women and marginalized male workers in the workplace. We review 15 CSR reports from Korean MNEs as a primary data source for examining corporate policies and disclosure on gender-equality issues in the workplace. We explore the inherently embedded meaning of CSR reports to evaluate the masculine tone of gender relations in these texts. To deepen our understanding, we retrieved the original text segments, coded them by using a categorical framework and revisited our data to critically examine our interpretation of the narrative structures that we argue reflect and reproduce certain discourses of masculinity, through the (in)visibility of women, the marginalization of women and (part-time) men, and the silencing of their voices by the Korean male hegemony.     

Sense and sensitivity: the roles of organisation and stakeholders in managing corporate social responsibility

While companies are increasingly convinced of the relevance of CSR, many are still struggling to define their responsibility. Part of the answer to this question can be found in the dual approach towards CSR. The authors unravel the concept of CSR into two components: responsibility and responsiveness. Regarding the firm's responsiveness towards society, companies can adopt two positions. They might adopt an inside-out approach towards CSR and emphasise their own ambitions. Alternatively, they can approach stakeholders from an outside-in perspective, wherein stakeholder claims dominate. The authors argue that both perspectives are inadequate with regard to complex societal issues. Therefore, a third approach towards societal interaction is proposed. This is characterised by a process of collective sensemaking, aimed at understanding the issue and defining responsibilities.     

Corruption and social trust: The role of corporate social responsibility

The importance and benefits of social trust have widely been recognized in the literature. However, there has been increasing concern about corruption in relation to a decline in social trust, and the role of business in this relationship remains largely unknown. This study aims to examine the linkages among corruption, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and social trust. Using a large sample of 6892 corporations from 33 countries over the period 2010–2014, the results demonstrate that corruption generates a highly eroding effect on social trust, whereas CSR has important implications for promoting trust among people in society. The results further suggest the potential role of CSR in mitigating the eroding effect of corruption on social trust. These results are robust across various methods of estimation, falsification tests, and in a different time period (2017–2020). This study makes several contributions to the literature both theoretically and empirically, and offers meaningful implications for businesses and policymakers.     

Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains and Industrial Clusters: Why Governance Matters

The burgeoning literature on global value chains (GVCs) has recast our understanding of how industrial clusters are shaped by their ties to the international economy, but within this context, the role played by corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to evolve. New research in the past decade allows us to better understand how CSR is linked to industrial clusters and GVCs. With geographic production and trade patterns in many industries becoming concentrated in the global South, lead firms in GVCs have been under growing pressure to link economic and social upgrading in more integrated forms of CSR. This is leading to a confluence of “private governance” (corporate codes of conduct and monitoring), “social governance” (civil society pressure on business from labor organizations and non-governmental organizations), and “public governance” (government policies to support gains by labor groups and environmental activists). This new form of “synergistic governance” is illustrated with evidence from recent studies of GVCs and industrial clusters, as well as advances in theorizing about new patterns of governance in GVCs and clusters.