This article highlights CSR disclosure as a strategic response of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) to the social risk they face in host countries. Deviating from prior research that aims to directly measure social risk, we offer a new approach to isolate the effect of social risk by leveraging China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) as the research context, under which Chinese MNEs are largely protected from political risk in membership countries but are exposed to substantial social risk from local nongovernment stakeholders. Results from difference-in-differences analyses show that after the enactment of the BRI, Chinese MNEs investing in BRI countries significantly increases their likelihood of CSR disclosure than that of their counterparts investing in non-BRI countries. Further, such effects are more pronounced for state-owned MNEs and MNEs in natural resource industries. This research enriches the international business literature on the relationship between political risk and social risk, and that between corporate political actions and corporate social responsibility.

Firms should be considered as actors that potentially mediate between social movement pressures and policy outcomes. This article shows that at the mining project level, social mobilization can generate important changes in corporate practices toward nearby communities, and that these practices can undermine the cohesion of social movement coalitions advocating for regulatory intervention or reform, thus limiting their ability to make compelling claims on the state. In this way, company interpretations of and responses to protest are an important mediating process that conditions civil society efforts to activate state institutions in their favor. This argument extends recent work on the social foundations of regulation in Latin America by including corporate actors. The article is based on a comparative case study of the Pascua Lama/Veladero mining projects in both Argentina and Chile, using both secondary sources and primary field research.

The business case constitutes an important instrumental motive for corporate social responsibility (CSR), but its relationship with other moral and relational motives remains controversial. In this article, we examine the articulation of motives for CSR among different stakeholders in Germany historically. On the basis of reports of German business associations, state agencies, unions, and nongovernmental organizations from 1970 to 2014, we show how the business case came to be a dominant motive for CSR by acting as a coalition magnet: the vocabulary was used strategically by key policy entrepreneurs, while being ambiguous for flexible interpretations by different stakeholders, and thereby growing in attractiveness. As a resulting discourse coalition emerged among business, state, and civil society actors, the moral and relational motives for CSR became increasingly marginalized. The article offers a new approach to studying motives and contributes to understanding the complementary or competing nature of different motives for CSR.

This introduction argues that the use of the concept of deliberative democracy in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research needs to be theoretically extended. We review three developments that have recently occurred in deliberative democracy theory within political science and philosophy: 1) the conceptualization of deliberative systems (macro level), 2) the considerations of mini-publics (micro level), and 3) the role of online deliberation. We discuss the challenges and prospects that incorporating these three developments into future CSR-related research creates. We thereby also introduce the articles in this special issue and show how they connect to each of the three developments. On the basis of this discussion, we outline the contours for a more general program of distributed deliberative CSR that enables CSR scholars to incorporate an updated understanding of deliberative democracy theory into their future work.

This commentary looks at the use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) mechanisms for implementing responsible data use. The commentary offers an overview of CSR theory and the discourse on a growing phenomenon known as corporate digital responsibility (CDR). The commentary links these theories to the historical debates on the nature of technology, ethics, and society. The aim is to reflect on CSR and CDR mechanisms and ignite the discussion on their adequacy considering the pursuit of data responsibility. Through our discussion and brief case studies, the paper reveals the gaps in relying on CSR and CDR and the need for a broader societal and comprehensive approach.

We investigate the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (often assumed to reflect corporate voluntarism) and government (often assumed to reflect coercion). We distinguish two broad perspectives on the CSR and government relationship: the dichotomous (i.e., government and CSR are / should be independent of one another) and the related (i.e., government and CSR are / should be interconnected). Using typologies of CSR public policy and of CSR and the law, we present an integrated framework for corporate discretion for engagement with public policy for CSR. We make four related contributions. First, we explain the dichotomous and the related perspectives with reference to their various assumptions and analyses. Second, we demonstrate that public policy for CSR and corporate discretion coexist and interact. Specifically, we show, third, that public policy for CSR can inform and stimulate corporate discretion and, fourth, that corporations have discretion for CSR, particularly as to how corporations engage with such policy.

Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gone “mainstream,” the relationship between CSR and corporate political activities (CPA) has received little scholarly attention. This is problematic because firms potentially have a more sizable impact through their lobbying activities for socially and environmentally beneficial (or unbeneficial) public policies than through their own operations. This paper investigates if, and how, UN Global Compact signatory firms differ in their policy preferences on key EU proposals compared to other interest groups. To capture state-of-the-art data on firms’ policy preferences, I draw from the INTEREURO database, which includes firms’ lobbying positions on forty-three directives and twenty-seven regulations covering 112 public policy issues in the European Union. Statistical results show that Global Compact signatory firms significantly lobby for stricter regulation than non-signatory firms and industry associations, however, their positions are still lower than nonbusiness groups. These results are similar across various public policy issues and suggest that the regulatory preferences of firms’ participating in soft law CSR initiatives are more aligned with stakeholders' interests. This paper contributes to public policy literature exploring the relationship between hard and soft law as well as literature studying the political representation of divergent interest.

To deepen our understanding of organizations’ heterogeneous responses to institutional demand, we develop a ‘relational complexity’ argument to highlight organizations’ diverse institutional linkages as another important source of practice variation. We argue that diverse relations between organizations and the institutional authority can filter distinct institutional pressures and expectations, shape organizational interpretations of environmental demands, and thus trigger heterogeneous organizational practices. We adopt this theoretical framework and distinguish two types of institutional linkages with the state to understand different adoption patterns in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in its early stage of diffusion in China. Based on a national survey dataset consisting of 1,268 firms, our analyses show that firms having a stronger bureaucratic linkage with the state tend to focus on more visible external-oriented CSR practices. In contrast, those firms forming a closer partnership with the state through political or semi-political associations are more likely to take more extensive adoptions by further developing internal CSR structures. This study enriches the institutional analyses by shifting our attention to the relational dynamics between organizations and institutional authority as a key source of practice variation. It also has important implications to the research and practices of CSR in emerging economies.

Transnational carbon major companies are responsible for over 30% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions and exert tremendous influence over future global climate trajectories. Yet, they are not governed through top-down, stringent emissions limits, but are instead regulated largely by disclosure-only domestic requirements and market-based or voluntary corporate social responsibility mechanisms. Through an examination of the requirements of domestic laws such as the United Kingdom (UK) Climate Change Act 2008 and the UK Energy Act 2013, as well as the environmental and sustainability reports produced under the UK Companies Act 2006 (Strategic Report and Directors’ Report) Regulations 2013, this article analyzes the regulatory requirements placed on carbon majors, and the climate change pledges and emissions of five UK-based carbon majors: BP, Royal Dutch Shell, BG Group, National Grid, and Centrica. The article concludes that the efforts to curb emissions in these carbon major entities are being subverted by company law, company theory and commercial norms such as shareholder wealth maximization.

Using a sample of Chinese family firms during the period of 2004–2010, we examine the influence of media coverage on corporate philanthropic giving and the moderating role of family ownership. Specifically, we document that media coverage is significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropic giving, suggesting that media coverage as an informal system plays an important role in motivating Chinese family firms to establish business ethics, shape socially responsible images, and enhance corporate philanthropy. Moreover, family ownership attenuates the positive association between media coverage and corporate philanthropic giving. Our findings are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests and are still valid after controlling for the potential endogeneity between media coverage and corporate philanthropy. Our study is one of few studies to investigate the impact of media coverage on corporate philanthropic giving in an emerging market.

In the context of education for sustainable development, the purpose of this paper is to report on the findings of a study in Spain into the extent to which corporate social responsibility (CSR) is taught in management schools. The study makes an exploratory and descriptive web-content analysis of the curriculum and subjects on Business and Management degrees at all universities in Spain. Our findings show that a high percentage of universities include CSR-related subjects on their curriculum. CSR content is taught as either specific CSR subjects (stand-alone CSR subjects) or as part of various subjects on the academic curriculum (embedded CSR subjects). Although at first sight our findings may seem promising, a more detailed analysis shows that few universities include stand-alone CSR subjects and that although many universities have embedded CSR subjects, the CSR content is by no means fully developed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine firms’ adoption of corporate social responsibility activities and the efficacy of such activities in specific contexts and industries. This paper analyses the specific context of the Spanish construction and real-estate industry. By using a longitudinal multi-case approach, the study suggests links between market orientation and corporate social responsibility. The research also identifies two profiles of firms. The first group, which is proactive (e.g., market oriented), demonstrate altruistic concerns about consumers and corporate social responsibility; for the second, which is more reactive, their concerns about corporate social responsibility are more opportunistic and aimed at attracting additional customers or responding to competitive pressures.

This paper explores how corporations, through their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities, can help to effect positive developmental change. We use research on institutional change, deinstitutionalization, and institutional work to develop our central theoretical framework. This framework allows us to suggest more explicitly how CSR can potentially be mobilized as a purposive form of institutional work aimed at disrupting existing institutions in favor of positive change. We take the gender institution in the Arab Middle East as a case in point. Our suggestion is that the current context of the Arab Spring, which combined with increasingly obvious endogenous institutional contradictions, has created a fertile ground for shaping change processes within the gender institution. Finally, we provide concrete examples of CSR initiatives that regional corporate actors can engage in for positive developmental change supporting women.

This study identified and analysed current corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and benefits gained from implementing these activities in the United States (US) lodging industry. A survey of the US-based hotel executives showed that the most important and highest performing initiatives tended to be popular environmental practices focused on energy, waste and water management. Hotel executives reported that cost savings and branding-related outcomes were the greatest benefits from CSR implementation. It is argued that increased consumer and managerial learning of CSR activities from a holistic perspective is critical to moving the CSR program forward in the lodging industry.