The influence of institutional context and industry on how social responsibility is organized: A portfolio analysis

The literature on organizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) endorses different strategies to managers. For example, Porter & Kramer (2006) urge managers to align corporate social actions (CSAs) with a firm's core business. At the same time, Pearce & Doh (2005) tell them not to slide towards a CSR dominated mission. In a similar way, different recommendations exist on the extent to which CSAs should be aligned with the interests of varying stakeholders. The different recommendations are illustrative for the difficult choices that firms must make when engaging in CSR. So for good reasons, organizing CSR is often regarded as a complex and by times paradoxical exercise (Vilanova et al. 2009). At the same time little scholarly work focuses on how CSR is factually organized and whether this significantly differs in varying settings.

The research that we present here offers three contributions that address this. We start by advancing a portfolio perspective on CSR, in which CSR is seen as a portfolio of CSAs, each organized differently. In line with other scholars (Salazar et al. 2012), we argue that a portfolio perspective allows for greater descriptive insights into how firms organize CSR and helps to make a firm's societal engagement better manageable. Next, we highlight institutional context and industry as variables that we expect to have a significant influence on how firms organize CSR. Finally, we present a study to analyze CSR portfolios of firms in different institutional contexts and industries. Several methodological aspects are discussed.

Publication year:2014

Keywords:CSR, portfolio, institutional setting, business alignment, content analysis