Neither National Boundaries Nor Transnational Social Spaces: Accounting for Variations of CSR Practices in Varieties of Capitalism

Abstract

The paper empirically re-examines the role of national institutions and trans-national social spaces in accounting for variations in CSR practices. Based on a longitudinal study of corporate social reporting in UK and Germany, the paper concludes that corporate stakeholder salience patterns are outcomes of interaction effects between national institutional boundaries and trans-national social spaces. It pushes the institutionalist frontier of research to corporate stakeholder salience -which is a precursor and intrinsic to both corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility. In addition, it opens a new vista of looking at corporate social reports -i.e. not only as artefacts of accountability, but also carriers and reflectors of national and trans-national characteristics and influences. The paper finally highlights implications of the findings for CSR and comparative capitalism research, respectively.

CSR in publicly owned enterprises: opportunities and barriers

“…Dirk Matten and Jeremy Moon formulated “implicit” and “explicit” CSR as a normative, conceptual framework for understanding CSR in Europe (Matten and Moon, 2004a, 2008). It has been quoted, compared, criticised and stated by many theorists and thereby ahs been seen as very relevant in the discussion of CSR in Europe (Boesby et al , 2008; Amaeshi, 2008; Donaldson, 2008; Williams and Aguilera, 2008; Aytac, 2009; Benjnouh, 2009; Lockett et al , 2006; Crane and Matten, 2004; Matten and Moon, 2004a; Moon, 2004). By Explicit CSR we refer to corporate policies to assume responsibility for the interests of the society.…”