Getting By or Getting Ahead? Institutional Logics, Enterprise Logics, and Firms’ CSR Reporting

Abstract

We study firms’ strategic responses to the institutionalization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs among Chinese public firms. Borrowing insights from recent literature on practice variation, we study firms’ choice of CSR strategies based on their degree of conformity to the scope and content dimensions of the CSR practices. We propose an institutional logics framework to understand the impacts of competing logics on firms’ CSR strategies and specify the boundary conditions of these impacts. The empirical results of corporate social strategies of Chinese listed companies from 2008 to 2014 suggest that firms with greater political legitimacy tend to exhibit lower scope conformity while higher emphasis conformity, but for firms with intensive analyst coverage, they tend to favor higher scope conformity and lower emphasis conformity. Further analyses show that the influences of institutional logics are conditioned by socioeconomic conditions such as competitive intensity and illegitimate industry identity.