A new taxonomy on CSR practices as basis for a new theory on CSR

Abstract

The role of business within the society is a topic of discussion between academics and practitioners since early 1950, resulting in numerous theories and various taxonomies on CSR practices without consensus. The article provides an overview on existing CSR theories and a literature review of 11 CSR practice taxonomies. Taxonomies derived from empirical studies suffer limitations such as single country or single industry base. In order to overcome these limitations, an inductive qualitative multi-country and multi-industry study was performed to derive a new taxonomy on CSR practices. Our findings revealed 15 categories of CSR practices. The categories in the taxonomy are not fully similar to existing taxonomies, and some practices are not addressed by existing taxonomies. Discussion of the findings revealed that the proposed CSR taxonomy 'borrows' from many theories on CSR, thereby suggesting it can be the base for a new holistic, founded on empirical grounds, theory on CSR.