مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکتی و تئوری سازمانی: دیدگاه های جدید در مدیریت خصوصی Corporate Social Responsibility and institutional theory: new perspectives on private governance

۱٫ Corporate Social Responsibility research and its strange neglect of institutions Talking to the participants of doctoral workshops on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) research at major conferences these days, it is quite striking to discover how many young scholars have discovered institutional theory as a framework for their work. Institutional theory seems all the rage these days. This, however, has not always been the case. Despite its recent growth, the application of institutional theory to understand CSR-related phenomena is a rather recent development. Only in the mid-2000s did a literature emerge which broadened the array of conceptual tools used in CSR research (Aguilera et al., 2007; Campbell, 2007; Matten and Moon, 2008). Given that C‘S’R includes the aspect of ‘society’ already in its very label, one would have thought that institutional theory would have been a core conceptual lens in understanding the ‘social’ responsibilities of business all along. After all, in its very definition, institutional theory appears to be right at the centre of what CSR is all about, as this quote from the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis shows (Morgan et al., 2010, p. 3): The field [in which] we are interested can be defined in how the forms, outcomes, and dynamics of economic organisation (firms, networks, markets) are influenced and shaped by other social institutions […] and with what consequences for economic growth, innovation, employment, and inequality. Institutions are usually defined […] as formal or informal rules, regulations, norms, and understandings that constrain and enable behaviour. It is fair to say that the literature on CSR, most of it published in management or business studies journals, has neglected the societal aspects of CSR by and large. Most of the literature has treated the ‘social’ element as a black box, as a set of external requirements which are translated into a functionalist, instrumental and business case rationale for social engagement by companies (Margolis and Walsh, 2003). This is certainly reflected by some of the meta studies of the CSR literature (De Bakker et al., 2005; Lockett et al., 2006) as well as more critical analysis of CSR as a subfield of management (Banerjee, 2007; Hanlon, 2008). As Campbell (2007) argues, the CSR literature has been mostly either descriptive or normative. In this vein, the bulk of empirical research has investigated the relationship between CSR and its impact on the financial performance of the firm (Orlitzky et al., 2003). The strong fascination with the business case for CSR is a noteworthy phenomenon in itself—to the extent that social science would be able to demonstrate the existence of a market for virtue (Vogel, 4 S. Brammer et al. by guest on December 20, 2014 http://ser.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from 2006), this evidence would also be a powerful normative argument for firms and their managers to behave in more responsible ways. The focus on the firm as the pivotal actor in initiating socially desirable behaviour on the part of business has been institutionalized into the way of conceptualizing and studying CSR, particular within business schools. While common definitions of CSR include mandatory responsibilities, such as legal compliance, or make reference to societal expectations (Carroll, 1999), a recurring theme in the CSR debate is its grounding in the voluntary behaviour of companies. For example, Vogel (2006) describes CSR in terms of ‘practices that improve the workplace and benefit society in ways that go above and beyond what companies are legally required to do’ (p. 2). This view reflects the dominance of agency theory as a way of understanding the nature of the firm in business/management studies (Garriga and Mele´, ۲۰۰۴) and the relegation of business ethics to the sidelines (Khurana, 2007). This same emphasis on voluntarism is something that recurs in policy documents of leading business associations (Kinderman, 2012). Indeed, even major public policy initiatives have not challenged this core assumption. For example, the European Commission (2001, p. 6) Green Paper defines social responsibility as ‘a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis’. Over the last decade, the scholarly debate on CSR has slowly but steadily registered a growing unrest about this rather limited approach to understanding the social responsibilities of business. A first reservation has to do with the rather limited value of a business-centred approach to CSR research. As a number of studies have suggested, the results of this strand of research are, at best, inconclusive (Orlitzky, 2008). The argument that businesses engage in CSR just as one of many other ways of increasing the firm’s performance seems patently unfit to explain why businesses engage or disengage in socially desirable outcomes. This is closely related to a second aspect, namely the advent of globalization and its influence on business studies. If CSR is just another way of increasing profits, it begs the question of why forms of CSR differ so vastly among regions and countries globally. Furthermore, it raises the question of why CSR as a mostly North American or, at best, Anglo-Saxon idea has only rather recently spread to other parts of the global economy. To explain this with a rather limited set of arguments around efficiency and profit maximization appears to have rather limited purchase, since many highly successful companies in Japan and Western Europe continue to thrive without much serious ‘explicit’ (Matten and Moon, 2008) attention to CSR and related concepts. A third aspect, however, has to do with a growing scrutiny of the role of private corporations in the public sphere over the last two decades. Interest in CSR has been sparked by questions around the impact of corporations on indigenous Corporate Social Responsibility and institutional theory 5 by guest on December 20, 2014 http://ser.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from people (Banerjee, 2000), working conditions in developing countries (Radin and Calkins, 2006), the environment (Jermier et al., 2006) and political campaigns in developed democracies (Crouch, 2004). These issues have demonstrated that the private firm is something much more than just a profit-driven economic actor in society. Corporations are not just passive players in a global economy whose social impacts follow a simple profit-maximization rationale with little relevance beyond the confines of the corporate sphere. The corporation has always been a political creation—the state granted the corporation the benefit of limited liability in order to facilitate the accumulation of capital. Early corporations received limited liability initially to pursue the public interest but slowly spread throughout the economy (Roy, 1997). This extension of limited liability created a fundamental issue of corporate governance. But it is not simply a matter of how managers are to be made accountable to the more diffuse group of shareholders as agency theory tells us, but a more fundamental issue of what responsibilities society places on the corporation itself in exchange for the legal privilege of limited liability. Corporate power and responsibility are matters of public concern (for an excellent conceptual overview, see Parkinson, 1993). Corporations have a decisive impact on outcomes of employment, consumption, environmental quality, social inequality and a host of other issues. The influence of corporations penetrates into the very fabric of modern cultural understandings and practices, as documented by the debates surrounding ‘McDonaldization’, ‘Starbuckization’ (Ritzer, 2010) and ‘Disneyization’ in the sphere of consumption (Bryman, 1999) as well as surrounding understandings of gender (Orenstein, 2011). Indeed, the post-2008 era of financial crisis has taught an important lesson: the limited liability of the privately owned corporation has re-emerged as the collective liability of society. The attempt to broaden the lens on understanding business behaviour is, however, not confined to the study of CSR. As Barley (2007, p. 214) argues, the management literature in general has yet to take such a broader understanding of the relationship between business and its (economic, social, political, technical, etc.) environments seriously: Since the 1960s, organizational theorists have spent most of their time developing theories of how environments affect organizations and, more recently, how organizations affect each other. It is time for organizational theorists to pay much closer attention to how organizations alter and even create their environments, especially institutional sectors that lie outside the economy and that get little attention. It is therefore not surprising that a growing interest in institutional theory among CSR scholars has coincided with a growing influence of institutional theory on management research in general. Most notably, international business studies 6 S. Brammer et al. by guest on December 20, 2014 http://ser.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from have seen a steep rise in adapting institutional theory to understanding the way multinational corporations (MNCs) manage their operations globally (Westney and Zaheer, 2001; Geppert et al., 2006; Jackson and Deeg, 2008). This growing interest in institutional theory in this subfield of management studies is by no means coincidental. Rather, it echoes some of important benefits this theoretical lens may bring to the study of CSR.