Globalization and Commitment in Corporate Social Responsibility

By Alwyn Lim, Kiyoteru Tsutsui. 2012

403 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article examines why global corporate social responsibility (CSR) frameworks have gained popularity in the past decade, despite their uncertain costs and benefits, and how they affect adherents’ behavior. We focus on the two largest global frameworks—the United Nations Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative—to examine patterns of CSR adoption by governments and corporations. Drawing on institutional and political-economy theories, we develop a new analytic framework that focuses on four key environmental factors—global institutional pressure, local receptivity, foreign economic penetration, and national economic system. We propose two arguments about the relationship between stated commitment and subsequent action: decoupling due to lack of capacity and organized hypocrisy due to lack of will. Our cross-national time-series analyses show that global institutional pressure through nongovernmental linkages encourages CSR adoption, but this pressure leads to ceremonial commitment in developed countries and to substantive commitment in developing countries. Moreover, in developed countries, liberal economic policies increase ceremonial commitment, suggesting a pattern of organized hypocrisy whereby corporations in developed countries make discursive commitments without subsequent action. We also find that in developing countries, short-term trade relations exert greater influence on corporate CSR behavior than do long-term investment transactions.

Subfields: Development, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23ef5c885b11abfeac0737de85ce75efd2f2160e

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Citations in the corpus

Are Family Firms Really More Socially Responsible? (2014, background): “Indeed, some would argue that external forces have transformed CSR “from heresy to dogma” for modern corporations (Lim & Tsutsui, 2012).”
The Rise of Socially Responsible Investment Funds: The Paradoxical Role of the Financial Logic (2019, background): “We examined the extent to which civil society is powerful in the country (Marquis, Toffel, and Zhou, 2016) and the extent to which the country has links to international NGOs (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012; Smith and Wiest, 2012).”
Codes in context: How states, markets, and civil society shape adherence to global labor standards: Codes in context (2015, methodology): “…the number of INGOs per country from the Yearbook of International Organizations (Union of International Associations, 2004-2009) and, like Lim and Tsutsui (2012), focus on federations of international organizations, universal membership organizations, intercontinental membership organizations,…”
Change above the Glass Ceiling: Corporate Social Responsibility and Gender Diversity in Japanese Firms (2018, background): “…University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign groups, nongovernmental organizations, and supra-governmental institutions have played a crucial role by creating codes of ethics in business and promoting socially responsible practices (Vogel, 2005; Bartley, 2007; Lim and Tsutsui, 2012; Locke, 2013).”
Institutional Drivers for Corporate Social Responsibility in an Emerging Economy: A Mixed-Method Study of Chinese Business Executives (2017, background): “Previous research on global embeddedness reveals several pathways through which firms may conform to institutional forces from the global CSR movement (Lim & Tsutsui, 2012).”
Willing and Able: A General Model of Organizational Responses to Normative Pressures (2017, background): “…(Okhmatovskiy & David, 2012), lack of compliance in emerging markets (Malesky & Taussig, 2016), meaningful thirdparty certification to communicate compliance (King, Lenox, & Terlaak, 2005), decoupling due to lack of capacity, and organized hypocrisy due to lack of will (Lim & Tsutsui, 2012).”
From Employment Relations to Consumption Relations: Balancing Labor Governance in Global Supply Chains (2014, background): “…lacking central enforcement authority, private standards can have law-like effects (Terlaak, 2007), becoming binding and enforceable rules through independent, third-party, certification systems and diffusing globally as a result of institutional pressure (Bansal & Roth, 2000; Lim & Tsutsui, 2012).”