Muddling through Political and Economic Tensions:A Territorialized Conception of Political CSR

Abstract

This article draws on the political CSR literature to investigate how an organization responds to political and economic tensions through its corporate community involvement (CCI). It is based on the longitudinal case study of a hybrid organization in the space industry, which has engaged in relations with the local community over the last 50 years and has gone through significant change. Through this exploratory study, we make two main contributions. Firstly, we extend the political CSR literature by showing that the current transformation of CSR is not only the result of a movement of the private corporation into the public (political) sphere, but also the consequence of a converse movement of public (political) actors into the economic sphere. The blurred frontiers between the economic and political spheres theorized by political CSR are then the result of this dynamic and nonlinear movement, which increasingly generates hybrid organizations. Secondly, this paper shows that in order to understand how CSR is shaped it is necessary to recognize the contingencies of the local context in which a firm operates. This finding critically challenges the de-territorialized approach of political CSR which implicitly leads to the conclusion that CSR follows a universal template, and instead calls for more research on the role of the local context (i.e. the community) in shaping CSR.