Drivers of CSR anchoring in transition economies: Evidence from Poland

Abstract

AbstractWe examine the drivers of corporate social responsibility anchoring in Poland, a country that has undergone a profound transition from a command economy to a free market system. We use a fine‐grained theoretical framework to understand the influence of the interactions between regulative, normative, and cultural‐cognitive aspects of institutions with firm organizational factors on the diffusion of corporate social responsibility. We show that, in Poland, companies use their slack resources to adopt corporate social responsibility only when facing strong normative or regulative institutional pressures in their organizational fields. When such pressures are absent, companies prefer value‐enhancing functions of their resources other than investing in corporate social responsibility. We propose a multilevel approach for studying drivers of corporate social responsibility and show how the importance of organizational‐level drivers emerges clearly only if the interactions with institutional‐level features are considered. The main policy implication of our study is that corporate social responsibility may establish in Poland, as well as in other Eastern Europe countries, provided that designed and formalized institutional processes reach relevant organizational fields. Furthermore, we find that, for business managers, employing financial slack for social responsibility projects may be perceived as institutionally legitimate or not depending on the type of institutional pressures prevailing in each organizational field.