Strategic governance of CSR: a multi-industry, multi-period analysis on integration dynamics

To contribute to a dynamic and contingent understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) governance in business systems, we examine a broad set of CSR initiatives in banking and oil firms from Europe and the US during the course of 6 years. Grounded in the activity system perspective on firms, we define three CSR integration levels, namely independent, peripheral and core CSR initiatives. A total of 2191 unique CSR initiatives by 12 firms between 2007 and 2012 were identified, tracked and categorized through content analysis. We find that 60 to 70% of CSR initiatives are newly introduced annually, fairly independent of industry or institutional setting. Banks do however organize considerable more independent CSR initiatives than oil firms. We observe moreover that European firms toned the number of CSR initiatives down between 2008 and 2010, whereas US firms organized more initiatives during these years. We conclude with several recommendations for future research on CSR integration logics.

Publication year:2015

Keywords:corporate social responsibility, content analysis, activity system perspective