Prior research in strategic decision making has relied primarily on the application of economic and financial models within strategic decisions. Environmentaland social issues have, as a result, been force-fit into existing models, rather than developing a deep understanding of how these ‘soft’ issues are actually incorporated into strategic decisions. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how social and environmental concerns are addressed in strategic decisions. It does so inductively, by interviewing 29 professionals addressing corporate social responsibility and 110 strategic decision makers in 19 companies in Canada. This paper reports some of the interim findings.

The paper presents an analysis of the influence of welfare state regimes on national models of corporate social responsibility. The paper takes its point of departure in Esping-Andersen’s three models of welfare state regimes. These models are extended to provide hypotheses on the role of corporate social responsibility in the provision of welfare goods. The paper exemplifies its points by providing an analysis of the Danish model of CSR, and drawing comparisons to other European models and the American model.

Economic growth requires a focus on building the assets of the poor, a strategic approach that is considerably broader than developing the poor only asconsumers and workers. The long-term sustainability of business and society will be enhanced if corporate investments that impact on poverty alleviation are far reaching, multi-faceted, and built through multi-sector partnerships. Emerging evidence indicates that corporations are increasingly involved on two important fronts: directly investing in ways that reduce poverty, and advocating for public policy investments to build the assets of the poor. Corporate involvement in asset policy can be understood as a new manifestation of corporate/business citizenship.

This paper analyses the areas of philanthropic expenditure prioritized by a sample of 164 large UK companies within a model that draws on economics and stakeholder theory. Broadly, our evidence suggests that firms make systematic choices over the alternative destinations of their philanthropic donations in ways that are rationalisable by reference to the particular strategic benefits that are associated with their business environments. Specifically, we identify statistically significant preferences for medical research among hitechnology companies, environmental causes among firms active in environmentally damaging industries, and educational charities among labour intensive companies. This provides significant support for studies that suggest that philanthropy is increasingly viewedstrategically by companies.

This paper investigates an under-researched relationship, that between corporate social performance (CSP) and geographical diversification. Drawingupon the institutional and stakeholder perspectives and utilising data on a sample of large UK firms, we develop a set of empirical models of CSP, and findevidence of a significant contemporaneous positive relationship between the two for some types of social performance and in some regions of the world. Overall,we provide evidence that firms shape their social performance strategies to their geographical profile.

The trend toward increased levels of business interconnectedness in the value chain has clouded the issue of responsibility for business practices. Firms havehistorically denied responsibility for many questionable practices by suggesting that such acts were committed somewhere else in the value chain and that, because they are separated by an arm’s length transaction, they are not responsible. Emerging evidence suggests that in light of the interconnected and networked business environment, the arm’s length defense is growing less effective. We discuss the practical realities that firms are facing in the highly networked environment and offer examples of each. We also offer practical guidance about each example within a total responsibility management framework.

This paper documents for the first time tournament incentives of pension fund managers and their preferences for social and environmental security characteristics. Using a comprehensive data set on pension fund security holdings, differences in manager tournaments are distinguished by sorting pension funds into portfolios based on the number of concurrent managers each pension fund employs. Results indicate that the way pension schemes structure portfolio manager tournament incentives is important in explaining the social and environmental portfolio firm characteristics of pension fund held stock.

Many scholars have pointed out obstacles to establishing a causal link between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and financial performance. Good Management Theory suggests CSR is necessary to maximizing financials. Others believe that, realistically, less ethical means are necessary. In response, this article proposes the Equivalency Theory of Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Returns (ETRR). It holds that, while CSR contributes to financials when managed adaptively and intelligently, unfortunately, corporate social irresponsibility produces equally strong financials when it is managed adaptively and intelligently. ETRR implies greater personal moral freedom and therefore responsibility for executives.

This paper develops an empirically grounded, processual view of corporate social performance (CSP) by analyzing how internal organizational processes affect a firm’s social performance. Based on two case studies, we argue that changes in a firm’s social performance are triggered by continuously reoccurring instances of poor fit between the firm’s routines and its institutional environment. We propose that reactive change processes, initiated by stakeholder critique threatening the organization’s legitimacy, will result in isomorphic type of social performance changes. In comparison, proactive change processes, initiated by slack resources, are more likely to result in nonisomorphic type of social performance changes. Furthermore, we propose that top-down driven processes will result in structural social performance changes in the direction of internationally influential stakeholders’ demands, while bottom-up driven processes will result in output social performance changes in the direction of locally influential stakeholders’ demands.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a tortured concept. In this paper, we reframe CSR into a number of discrete Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR’s), each of which can have a positive or negative social impact, and each of which has an endogenous managerially driven component, and an exogenous stakeholder driven component. Using an industry-level sample drawn from the KLD data base, we test the impact of hypothesized drivers of CSR on various CSR’s.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to investigate ‘CSP-FP relationship’ as a social construction on financial markets. The construction of such a relationship has become a crucial business problem since the legitimacy-building process of actors implied in markets related to corporate social responsibility evaluation and management is closely associated to the belief that ‘ethics and/or social responsibility pay’ – at least in the long run. Consequently, actors’ behaviours and beliefs on these markets can no longer be considered as external to the CSP-FP debate, but should be integrated as an endogenous variable. Moreover, the diffusion of these behaviours and beliefs could also contribute to the effective realization of such a relationship on financial markets and, to some extent, in the business arena. These facts offer the opportunity to reframe theoretically the classical and over-studied debate around ‘the CSP-FP link’ and to propose a new framework describing the various processes of performativity through which actors enact and construct the positive relationship between CSP and FP.

The purpose of this paper is to provoke a debate on the management of social issues building on the analysis of a well known illegal organization, namely theSicilian Mafia. According to the analytical framework provided by Gambetta (1993), the Sicilian Mafia could be considered as a business on its own dealing a specific commodity: the ‘protection of people’. That approach of ‘Mafia as a corporation’ allows investigating the social responsibility of that organization and the way the Mafia managed its key stakeholders. As we will argue, the recent spate of corporate scandals reveals the risk of normal corporations turning into a Mafia type of organization. One of the key drivers of those scandals is the overstretched instrumental interpretation of a corporation's societal responsibilities. By caricaturing and perverting some established practices of the mainstream approach to CSR perspective, we will demonstrate the potential pathologies of a CSR approach that is mainly based on the neoliberal foundation of individual and organizational self-interest.

Fairclough’s (1992) model of critical discourse analysis can be used to show how corporate social responsibility, stakeholder identity and the social relations between organisations and stakeholders are socially constructed in the social and environmental reports prepared by companies. An example from doctoral work-in-progress is provided. Preliminary findings suggest the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies construct corporate social responsibility as functionalist and economically-based. Stakeholders, rather than equal partners, are pacified and persuaded to Shell’s understandings about corporate social responsibility.

The decision to internalize corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, to outsource them in the form of corporate philanthropy, or to collaborate with otherorganizations is of great significance to the ability of the firm to reap benefits from such activity. Using insights provided by the new institutional economics and the resourcebased view of the firm, this paper describes how the variables of centrality and specificity affect CSR governance choice. This framework is tested using data collected from Central America and Mexico. Support is found for the relevance of centrality, but not for specificity. The paper discusses directions for future research and concludes with the managerial implications of this research.

Both positive and negative consequences typically result from business activities for all types of stakeholders. How these consequences are judged is at the heart of economics and ethics, sociology and political economy. For example, the poorly run supermarket in a low-income community that charges exorbitantly high prices rarely gets our sympathy, and we often call for more competition to bring down prices and improve customer service. At the same time, small businesses that serve their customers well and provide a modest living to the owners may well be threatened by the entry of a large efficient competitor, and we often call for less competition in order to preserve small firms. Such paradoxes are worth pondering and sorting out. We offer our assessment of the paradox by examining morally mature management and socially efficient political economies through the lens of global business citizenship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the legitimacy-building processes of Social Rating Organizations (SRO) and the role of objects in these processes. SROs have played a key role in the development of SRI in Europe by providing social and environmental rating to financial investors. However, little is known about the processes through which they have acquired their legitimacy, i.e. their ‘right-to-rate’ corporations. We provide here an in-depth empirical analysis of the legitimacy-building process of two European SROs and demonstrate the role played by objects in these processes of legitimacy construction.

This is an exploratory study of corporate social performance in firms with family members in executive, governance, or strong ownership positions. Family firmsdominate the economy in most countries, including the United States, and families are thought to be more concerned with personal wealth creation and risk avoidance than social performance. Although such firms have been shown to have superior financial performance, I found no evidence of superior (or inferior) social performance among family firms in the S&P 500. In a departure from the methodological norm in business and society, I used KLD data as dependent variables instead of independent variables. I was able to predict KLD scores from firm size, industry, and strategy variables, but family firm status rarely played a role.

This paper reports on comparative research on how textual representations of issues related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in corporate annual reports from Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands have changed over time. The results show a substantial increase on a number of topics that can be linked to the general CSR-discourse in the 2001 sample in comparison to the 1991 and 1981 samples. The rise in the CSR-discourse appears to be related to a drop in other discourses related to issues of social responsibility regarding the social, economic and political development of a company’s native country.

This paper explores the relationship between the corporate social performance (CSP) of subsidiaries and the transfer pricing policies at which multinationals trade with their subsidiaries. In this paper I develop a theoretical framework to propose that, to the extent to which those policies and practices shift income out of the subsidiary, transfer pricing policy may undermine the CSP of that subsidiary. In this way, the subsidiary may lose social legitimacy and incur in higher costs to acquire local resources.