How Context Matters in Non‐market Strategies: Exploring Variations in Corporate Social Responsibility‐Political Activity Relationships

Abstract

AbstractManaging the nexus between societal and political demands represents an important challenge for today's organizations. While non‐market strategy research debates the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate political activity (CPA), it remains unclear how and why this relationship varies across different contexts. Based on a literature review, we address this question by developing a multi‐contextual framework that allows us to organize existing literature and generalize beyond it. We contribute to non‐market strategy research by conceptualizing a theoretically grounded set of single contexts covering different country and industry environments, transitional contexts considering the dynamic nature of non‐market environments, and cross‐context settings to conceptualize environments multinational and diversified domestic firms operate in, and associate those with different CSR‐CPA relationships. We further contribute to broader non‐market strategy research by shedding light on the varying meanings of CSR and CPA, exploring novel epistemological and methodological perspectives, and developing a future research agenda.