Abstract
While scholarship exploring the impact of ownership structure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has investigated firms in developed markets, less work has examined how ownership in firms from emerging markets influences community-related CSR. Both internal and external forces potentially drive community-related CSR decisions. It is hence important to understand the role of internal constraints arising due to agency problems along with institutional pressures from external stakeholders in emerging markets in shaping CSR. In this study, we draw on agency theory and sociological perspectives of institutions to explore variations in the motivation of different owners to pursue a socially responsible agenda. Our analysis of a sample of Indian firms for the period 2008–2015 illustrates that business group and family ownership is beneficial for community-related CSR. Our theoretical arguments and results highlight the importance of combining multiple lenses to assess the influence of ownership structures on CSR in emerging markets.
Highlights
While scholarship exploring the impact of ownership structure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has investigated firms in developed markets, less work has examined how ownership in firms from emerging markets influences community-related CSR
We find that the moderating influence of business group affiliation on the relationship between family ownership and communityrelated CSR is not significant, which indicates that Hypothesis 4 is not supported
We utilize institutional and agency theory arguments to hypothesize that sensitivity to rising coercive and normative institutional pressures from stakeholders for community-related CSR must be considered along with principal-principal agency costs to determine whether ownership structure influences community-related CSR
Summary
We present the summary statistics for the entire sample in part (a). In part (b), we present the summary statistics of dependent and control variables specific to the ownership categories. Further analysis revealed that there were 11 government owned firms and 13 business group firms, which had spent over 500 million INR in community-related CSR at least once during the period of our study. We do not find a significant difference between the community-related CSR engagement of business groups and non-affiliated firms. We find a negative and significant correlation between government ownership and community-related CSR, and a positive
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