How CSR generates market-standard and acceptable business practices for corporations

Farid Baddache and Isabelle Nicolaï
Additional contact information
Farid Baddache: REEDS - Centre international de Recherches en Economie écologique, Eco-innovation et ingénierie du Développement Soutenable - UVSQ - Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Companies face increasing pressure from stakeholders to play a leading role in addressing a wide array of environmental, social, and governance issues. This paper shows how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a negotiation process to help corporations manage uncertainties through collaborative work and alignment with stakeholders. In this way, CSR is a process that generates standard and acceptable business practices. Using an adductive as well as an interpretative approach, we look at CSR as a collaborative process that builds rules and norms. CSR is defined as a contractual process between stakeholders in order to drive decision making processes and agree on commitments between business and society. A framework is presented linking CSR business practices research findings to empirical market isomorphism. Interestingly, all studied examples depict the development of standard and acceptable business practices with very little involvement of stakeholders, which is not the understood way of driving changes to business strategy as defined by the CSR negotiation processes. Our analysis suggests that CSR in practice, is little more than the achievements of fragmented initiatives led by companies showing (limited) transparency toward external stakeholders. The paper concludes with recommendations that public authorities play a strategic role showing clear direction, and establish themselves as a strategic platform enabling more engagement between stakeholders.

Keywords: negotiation; institutional economic theory; network organization; isomorphism; stakeholder theory; CSR business practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00911718
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00911718/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00911718

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().