Rise Of Corporate Social Responsibility Research Articles

Responsible CSR Communications: Avoid “Washing” Your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Reports and Messages

With the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting, questions have emerged regarding its true utility; CSR reports may more closely resemble marketing materials than financial statements as much of the data companies provide can be cherry picked. For example in 2011, only 20% of S&P 500 companies published CSR reports vs 85% in 2017 and 90% in 2019. Why is this relevant for communicators? Because the responsibility of producing and promoting CSR reports very often falls under the responsibility of the corporate communications team. How to avoid "CSR-washing" and all the other “washing” incidents – green-washing, blue-washing, rainbow-washing, vegan-washing,...? How to focus on portraying the organization as a truly and authentic dedicated corporate citizen? In-depth interviews with 15 senior communication practitioners in Canada helped identify what are “authentic” and “responsible” communications in the CSR space: using facts and testimonials, being transparent, showing authenticity as well as demonstrate the clear alignment with the organization’s purpose.

Paint it green: A neuroscientific approach to hotel sustainability and ecological tourism

Hoteliers and companies are asked to optimize their budgets and, at the same time, gifting unforgettable experiences to customers who are freely able to express their feedbacks, readable by thousands of potential guests. In addition, the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, environmental and social issues leads to the necessity to investigate more systematically new business models that respond to these emerging concerns. In order to investigate the impact of sustainability in tourism marketing, a multimethod neuroscientific approach was used to record individuals’ neural activity (electroencephalography, EEG) and autonomic system responses during the exploration of four different environments of a green hotel adopting a sustainability approach. EEG findings showed an increase of beta and theta frequency band activity during individuals’ environments exploration, underlying the presence of cognitive and emotional elaboration processes. Moreover, from autonomic activity, an increase of pulse volume amplitude (PVA) and heart rate (HR) response emerged during the exploration of hotel environments, highlighting emotional engagement and positive emotional response. This research, therefore, contributes to show how responsiveness to sustainability concept within consumer services can improve individuals’ experience enjoyment and customers' well-being condition.

Socially Responsible HRM, Employee Attitude, and Bank Reputation: The Rise of CSR in Bangladesh

Applying the organisational climate of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and human resource management (HRM) behavioural theories, this paper examines the associations among socially responsible HRM (SRHRM), organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), turnover intention, and bank reputation. The proposed model, including seven hypotheses, was examined on a sample of 711 Bangladeshi bank employees. The results suggest that SRHRM has significant positive effects on both OCB and bank reputation, and a significant negative influence on turnover intention. OCB was positively significant for bank reputation but was estimated as insignificant for bank employees’ turnover intention. Moreover, perceived bank reputation was significant and negative on Bangladeshi employees’ turnover intention. Finally, a partial mediation effect was found for OCB on the direct relationship between SRHRM and bank reputation. This paper recommends that banks should aim at higher levels of OCB and reputation and lower turnover intentions should encourage SRHRM in their strategic approaches for HRM and CSR. The implications of the results of this study can help financial organisations to recognise the significance of SRHRM and its favourable effects on employee motivation and institutional reputation.

La ética, el desarrollo sostenible y la responsabilidad social en las organizaciones


 La ética es un tema que ha sido objeto de preocupación de la humanidad a lo largo de toda su historia. Aplicado el tema a la empresa, es un asunto de reflexión intelectual de los hombres en el último medio siglo, tal como lo formula el surgimiento de la responsabilidad social corporativa; es decir, el tema que antes se orientaba solo a los valores de sujetos dotados de razón, ahora es predicable de personas ficticias a quien la ley las dotó de condiciones excepcionales que las hace aptas para contraer derecho y asumir obligaciones. Los códigos de conducta laboral, códigos de ética empresarial, códigos de buen gobierno y líneas directrices empresariales son ejemplo palpable de la nueva condición empresarial.
 El desarrollo sostenible surge como aspiración y anhelo social desde la década de los ochenta, temática que deberá sumarse a nuevos objetivos y estrategias organizacionales, situación que permitirá integrar las dimensiones ambiental, social y económica para formular una rendición integral de cuentas con respecto a la sustentabilidad. 

Stakeholder Symbiosis in the Context of Corporate Social Responsibility

With the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the great changes of the organization scale of the modern enterprise, it is difficult to maintain an ideal development only by maximizing the equity of shareholders. The co-governance of stakeholders can meet the interests of all stakeholders, which is the embodiment of corporate social responsibility in corporate governance. The creation and sharing of enterprise values are the foundation of the coexistence of stakeholders. A rational allocation of the limited enterprise values among stakeholders plays a crucial role in balancing their relationship and realizing the sustainable development of the enterprise. Based on the application of corporate social responsibility in stakeholder governance, this paper constructs a stakeholder symbiosis evolution model with the help of symbiosis theory. By solving the differential equation, the symbiotic evolution path of stakeholders is analyzed. The dynamic mechanism of stakeholder Symbiosis evolution is analyzed by using the system analysis method and evolution theory. The dynamic mechanism of the population evolution of stakeholders is represented in an original graphical manner to describe the symbiotic evolution process of stakeholders. Lastly, we use the numerical simulation method to simulate different symbiosis models which are reflected by different symbiosis coefficients. It is concluded that the symmetric mutual benefit symbiosis model is the most effective model to reflect corporate social responsibility.

Family Governance and CSR Decoupling

The rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) accompanies the growing skepticism about firms’ avowed adoptions of CSR policies, which can be coupled or decoupled from their actual implementations. Although firms often put CSR policies in place as window dressing, published studies about CSR decoupling are scarce, leaving the causes and conditions that shape CSR decoupling poorly understood. Drawing on the socioemotional wealth perspective, we theorize that controlling families are concerned with both economic wealth and socioemotional wealth and how they prioritize these dual concerns plays a key role in deciding over CSR decoupling. Specifically, we examine when family ownership is positively or negatively related to CSR decoupling by focusing on the conditions that make family owners concerned more about their socioemotional wealth. We hypothesize that returns and risks of CSR decoupling vary across firms according to the priority the family place on financial or nonfinancial gains. We argue that family ownership is positively related to CSR decoupling since family principals are more concerned with economic wealth as their ownership increases. However, this relationship shifts from positive to negative when the family CEO is at the helm of the firm because a family CEO increases family visibility and the family’s socioemotional concern. We also find that firm visibility attenuates the positive effect of family ownership on CSR decoupling. Our study uncovers the ambivalence of family control and reconciles previous inconsistencies in the literature on family business and CSR. In this way, we make a larger theoretical contribution to institutional theory and a wide array of decoupling studies.

Fostering Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Global Supply Chain: Capacity Building of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in APEC

The last decades have witnessed profound changes in the nature of production in the Asia-Pacific region as multinational corporations (MNCs) have pursued complex, cross-border production and distribution systems. This process has precipitated the integration of the APEC region through the emergence of global supply chains and global value chains. Increasingly connected global supply chains have created new opportunities for businesses, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing economies of the region, as they become important suppliers for MNCs. However, the development of unprecedented levels of cross-border production sharing has also brought new challenges for both business managers and public policymakers. In particular, the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards has created a new set of challenges for SMEs linked to global supply chains. A complex, multi-layered set of CSR standards concerning socially and environmentally sustainable business practices have been developed at international, national and local levels. An increasingly large number of MNCs have also started to demand that suppliers comply with corporate codes of conduct. The proliferation of CSR standards, global buyers’ requirements of supplier codes of conduct throughout their supply chains and various monitoring and audit mechanisms have created challenges for SMEs which tend to lack the capacity and resources to comply with new requirements. As the uptake of CSR has become a prerequisite to enter global supply chains in the region, SMEs which are unable to adopt CSR practices have been excluded from global supply chains. SMEs are drivers of sustained economic growth in APEC economies. Building CSR capacity of SMEs for their effective participation in global supply chains is thus an important challenge many APEC members face. The objective of this paper is to examine and propose the ways in which APEC can assist SMEs in the region to build the capacity to adopt CSR practices and to improve linkages with regional and global supply chains. CSR has emerged as an APEC agenda only recently and has not been given top priority so far. Furthermore, the initiatives of APEC so far have largely relied on CSR capacity building in a narrow sense. While capacity building of enterprises to adopt CSR is essential, its effectiveness can be limited without a supporting policy or regulatory environment.

Hope and Betrayal on the Platinum Belt: Responsibility, Violence and Corporate Power in South Africa

This article considers the resurgence in state-backed violence against mineworkers in South Africa, which reached its apogee at the Marikana platinum mines in August 2012, in relation to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the post-revolutionary political economy. I explore a paradox of CSR, which has emerged more strongly than ever in the wake of Marikana, whereby mining companies have been able to use CSR to dispense with (rather than fulfil) their social obligations and to externalise (rather than address) their social impact. Operating within an old-school logic of paternalism and benevolence, the practice of CSR is at odds with the discourse of empowerment, upward mobility and worker autonomy that modern mining companies claim to foster. Marikana shows us how CSR paradoxically serves as a resource that empowers companies (in response to their critics and claimants) rather than its intended beneficiaries.

An Exogenous Path of Development: Explaining the Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in China

An Exogenous Path of Development: Explaining the Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in China

The Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Tool for Sustainable Development for the SMEs in Saudi Arabia

<p>The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concept is not a new phenomenon for the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) operating in the Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian government has taken many initiatives in this regard. Arab forum for Environment and Development (AFED ) in their 2008 report have confirmed that the Arab countries have to shift their focus on the green economy to achieve sustainable development and this is possible if CSR is being successfully implemented in all the business organizations specially SMEs. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to analyze the awareness of SMEs regarding the concept of CSR and their efforts towards the CSR for a greener Saudi Arabia. </p>

International development and the private sector: The ambiguities of “partnership”

Historically, the relationship between the private sector and international development has been deeply ambivalent. For many, a vibrant private sector and competitive markets are the essential prerequisites of development. For many others, development is principally concerned with ameliorating the dislocation associated with capitalist profit seeking. In the last generation, this ambivalence has given way to an emphasis on the complementarities between the private sector and development. Yet skeptics have continued to criticize the form of development this trend has promoted. We review the historical conditions behind this trend; the controversies concerning transnational corporations and foreign direct investment; the rise of corporate social responsibility; the parallel rise of philanthrocapitalism; and the growth of micro-credit as a market-oriented vehicle for poverty alleviation and empowerment. When taken together, it is clear that private sector actors have become increasingly influential in the new landscape of development, yet their effects remain ambiguous.

Corporations as Norm Entrepreneurs

The Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility: Mining and the Spread of Global Norms. By Hevina S. Dashwood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 336 pp., $36.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-43725-8). Researchers interested in corporate social responsibility (CSR) have struggled on two accounts: First, it has been an uphill battle to convince casual observers that CSR is something more than an exercise in public relations, and second, it has proven difficult to frame CSR in a way that renders it theoretically visible to scholars of international affairs and global governance. Hevina S. Dashwood's new book takes on both of these challenges through a case study of corporate social responsibility adoption and promotion in the global mining industry. On the first point, Dashwood's analysis shows that the evolution of CSR in the mining industry had profound and substantive effects on how mining executives and the companies they run view their responsibilities to society, particularly regarding the social and environmental externalities of extractive activities. On the second point, she links CSR to the literature on how global norms emerge and influence international actors—including multinational mining companies. In this respect, The Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility is a study about the promotion and influence of norms, but in broader terms, the book argues for elevating the …

Situating corporate framings of child labor: Toward grounded geographies of working children in globalized agriculture

The expansion of multinational corporations into agricultural production around the world is resulting in new forms of engagement in specific places. In the context of neoliberal restructuring, these engagements are tied to shifting landscapes of societal, governmental and industry-based perceptions on the role of corporations in labor regimes. But how are these engagements developed and how do they connect to the everyday lives of workers? In India, when Monsanto expanded into hybrid cotton seed production in the early 2000s, the corporation came under pressure to address concerns over the widespread employment of children and young workers for seed pollination. In response, the corporation developed an approach to child labor that, I argue, works to reinforce generalized and problematic notions of childhood and work. Corporate engagements in global agriculture need to be situated in time and space, and alongside the experiences of workers. Children experience attempts to shape their patterns of work and mobility as a series of surmountable obstacles, disconnected from the process of deciding whether or not they will engage in this work. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Gujarat and Rajasthan, and documentary analysis of public documents, I outline the development of a corporate response to child labor and place it within the context of the rise of corporate social responsibility, global ideas of child labor, and in the specific case of cotton seed production in western India. I demonstrate that contextualized geographies of working children in globalized agriculture reveal the nature of multinational corporations’ engagements in specific places.

The internationalization of labour politics in Africa

This article considers recent international labour standards initiatives in Africa in the context of structural adjustment and the globalization of production. It is argued that examining these initiatives calls for means of drawing bridges between African studies and critical approaches to international political economy. The paper seeks to draw such a bridge using Gramsci's concepts of crisis and passive revolution. Labour relations are increasingly difficult to manage owing to processes of casualization, informalization, and conflicts between states and politically independent organized labour. Internationalization may enable a form of passive revolution by projecting the conflicts surrounding labour issues into non-threatening arenas. This argument is pursued through a discussion of the changing role of the International Labour Organization and the rise of corporate social responsibility in Africa.

From Taken‐for‐Granted to Explicit Commitment: The Rise ofCSRin a Corporatist Country

AbstractThis article contributes to a thriving line of research that examines issue interpretation and social accounts in order to study the adoption and diffusion of organizational concepts and management practices. It employs the empirical example of the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) inAustria between 1990 and 2005 to investigate the complex role institutional pressures and social positions of actors play in the local adoption of globally theorized ideas. More specifically, the study reveals distinct patterns in rhetoricalCSRadoption that illustrate the initial hesitation and reluctance of an established elite in theAustrian business community towards theAnglo‐American notion of ‘explicit’CSR, while non‐elite actors who were less favourably positioned in the social order readily embraced the concept. It is in such a sense thatCSRis nevertheless instrumentalized to challenge, reinterpret, or explicitly evoke the autochthonous idea of institutionalized social solidarity. Conceptually, this research takes into account social structure, actors' positions in the social order, and resulting divergent adoption motivations – i.e. the individual, yet socially derived, relevance systems of actors – and relates these to mechanisms and processes of institutional change.

Reflections on Foreign Direct Investment and Development with Reference to Non-Governmental Organizations and Corporate Social Responsibility

It is clear that the process of ‘globalization’ has presented acute economic challenges to developing countries. Great importance has been accorded to foreign direct investment (FDI) as a driver of development, a consequence of which is the further empowerment of transnational corporations (TNCs). Competition for FDI prevents host governments from implementing tough regulatory measures. In their stead have stepped in non-governmental organizations whose lobbying has had an appreciable impact on TNC activities and strongly contributed to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The article posits the concept of an ‘efficiency CSR hypothesis’. Though CSR is a positive outcome, it does not detract from the profound problems of development for the weakest developing countries via the route of inducing FDI in a globalized economic environment. Contrary to expectations, the increasing interdependence in the world economy presents formidable challenges to development and poverty alleviation for such economies.

Theatres of virtue

In recent years transnational corporations have become major players in the development arena. The rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) elevates corporations as leaders in a new orthodoxy of business-led development that promotes empowerment through “the market” as the panacea for global poverty. This vision has recruited support from disparate actors, turning combatants into collaborators. This article is based on thirteen months of multisited fieldwork, tracking the performance of CSR through the circuit of conventions and policy forums that constitute the social life of CSR. I argue that by claiming the confluence of doing good business and doing good, commitment to the market logic of maximisation is not only maintained, but endowed with a moral legitimacy and celebrated as the elusive win-win solution for which the development industry continues to search.

Tobacco Talk: Reflections on Corporate Power and the Legal Framing of Consumption

This article examines how North Carolina tobacco farmers think about the moral ambiguities of tobacco business. Drawing on ethnographic research with tobacco farmers and archival research on the tobacco industry, I specify the core psychological defense mechanisms that tobacco companies have crafted for people associated with the industry. I also document local social, cultural, and economic factors in rural North Carolina that underpin ongoing rural dependence on tobacco despite the negativity that surrounds tobacco and structural adjustments. This article contributes to our knowledge about tobacco farmers and tobacco farming communities, which is important for tobacco-control strategies. I reflect on ethical and economic paradoxes related to the rise of corporate social responsibility in the tobacco industry, where an official legal framing of consumption, focused on informed adult consumer autonomy and health education, is promoted to undermine more robust public health prevention efforts.

Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

As anthropologists and other critics of capitalism turn their attention to the controversial and burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, most focus on conflicts in community relations and environmental degradation. Few scholars have examined equally pertinent questions of labor restructuring, even though these transformations emerged at about the same time as the rise of CSR. In this article, we draw on research in two Peruvian mining communities to explore the potential contradiction between the simultaneous mandate for corporations to present themselves as responsible employers, on the one hand, and the drive to rationalize labor and reduce financial responsibility for the workforce, on the other. We suggest that for both corporate officials and some scholars, this tension remains a latent one because CSR discourses and documents generalize corporate interests as the interests of mines as a whole.

Neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility: A political economy of corporate citizenship

In this paper we situate the rise of corporate social responsibility in the context of a re-casting of the boundaries between corporate- and state-centred regulation. We argue that this process can be understood in a theoretical framework of “rolling-out” neoliberalisation. We focus firstly upon an emergent CSR consultancy industry within the UK context, demonstrating that there is now a network of organisations dedicated to making profit out of socially-responsible corporate behaviour. These organisations have helped to re-define the nature and meaning of the private sector. Then we interpret global framework agreements on corporate behaviour (such as the UN Global Compact, the Equator Principles, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative) as examples of how neoliberalism is created in and through new “in-between” spaces that set the rules of political action. Subsequently, we note that some NGOs have recently recognised the limits on campaigning for more socially responsible corporate activity, and re-connect these concerns with longer-term debates on corporate voluntarism versus state-centred regulation. We conclude that demonstrating how hegemony is constructed in and through neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility remains to be fully explored, but argue that it is beneficial to consider the diversity of political projects involved in this ongoing process.