Based on a survey and content analysis of 76 empirical research articles, this article reviews the factors driving Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure in both developed and developing countries. We find that firm characteristics such as company size, industry sector, profitability, and corporate governance mechanisms predominantly appear to drive the CSR reporting agenda. Furthermore, political, social, and cultural factors influence the CSR disclosure agenda. We find crucial differences between the determinants of CSR disclosure in developed and developing countries. In developed countries, the concerns of specific stakeholders, for example, regulators, shareholders, creditors, investors, environmentalists and the media are considered very important in disclosing CSR information. In developing countries, CSR reporting is more heavily influenced by the external forces/powerful stakeholders such as international buyers, foreign investors, international media and international regulatory bodies (e.g. the World Bank). Furthermore, in contrast to developed countries, firms in developing countries perceive relatively little pressure from the public with regards to CSR disclosure. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Using the example of multinational oil companies, this article suggests that there are fundamental problems surrounding the capacity of private firms to deliver development and the aspiration of achieving development through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) may be fundamentally flawed. The article is based on an extensive twelve‐month research project on the Gulf of Guinea region funded by the Nuffield Foundation. This research identified a number of constraints to a developmental role for CSR: the subservience of CSR schemes to corporate objectives; country‐ and context‐specific issues; the failure to involve the beneficiaries of CSR; the lack of human resources; technical/managerial approaches of company staff and the lack of CSR's integration into larger development plans. But even if private companies were able to overcome practical problems, it argues that the current CSR agenda fails to address the crucial issues of governance and the negative macro‐level effects that multinational companies cause in host countries. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on CSR may divert attention from broader political, economic and social solutions for developmental problems.

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Based on a survey and content analysis of 462 peer‐reviewed academic articles over the period 1990–2014, this article reviews theories related to the external drivers of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (such as stakeholder theory and resource‐dependence theory) and the internal drivers of CSR (such as resource‐based view [RBV] and agency theory) that have been utilized to explain CSR. The article discusses the main tenets of the principal theoretical perspectives and their application in CSR research. Going beyond previous reviews that have largely failed to investigate theory applications in CSR scholarship, this article stresses the importance of theory‐driven explanations of CSR and the complementarity of different theories. The article demonstrates that the current mainstream theorizing of CSR is dominated by theories related to the external drivers of CSR and is less developed with regard to the internal dynamics. The article outlines several productive avenues for future research: the need for multi‐theory studies and more research at multiple levels of analysis, particularly at the individual level of analysis. It suggests that CSR scholarship can benefit from combining theoretical insights from a range of established theoretical lenses such as institutional theory and RBV, and can gain new insights from theoretical lenses such as Austrian economics and micro‐level psychological theories.

There has been rising interest in political corporate social responsibility (political CSR), defined as activities where CSR has an intended or unintended political impact, or where intended or unintended political impacts on CSR exist. Based on a survey and content analysis of 146 peer-reviewed academic articles from 18 journals over the 14-year period 2000-2013, this paper systematically reviews the existing applications of general theories (such as legitimacy theory, the resource-based view and Habermasian political theory) within the political CSR literature. The survey indicates that the political CSR field is dominated by institutional theory and stakeholder theory, but future theory development needs to go beyond these theories in order to address a number of critical gaps. This review specifically points to several avenues for future political CSR research with regard to the individual level of analysis, domain integration and political CSR in multinational enterprises. The paper ends with a call for a new theory-informed and pluralist research agenda on political CSR to integrate different perspectives and re-examine the role of the state.