When Is There a Sustainability Case for CSR? Pathways to Environmental and Social Performance Improvements

Abstract

Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements.

The Sustainable Approach to Corporate Social Responsibility: A Global Analysis and Future Trends

“…Countries with more than five contributions have been grouped into eight clusters. The international cooperation based on co-authorship has evolved, mainly, in the last decade in the CSR paradigm and its link with the sustainable dimension, articulating a discourse in this cooperation that places the organization as the key agent for the alliance between sustainable development and public politics [146,147]. Table 8 lists the 20 most frequently used keywords in the 1832 articles on CSR's sustainable approach during the period 2001-2018.…”

“…These lines of research bring together all the concepts related to the sustainable approach of Corporate Social Responsibility, since it includes dynamics related to sustainable development in a globalized and connected world [150] and with management implying the active role of the organization [151]. The international cooperation based on co-authorship has evolved, mainly, in the last decade in the CSR paradigm and its link with the sustainable dimension, articulating a discourse in this cooperation that places the organization as the key agent for the alliance between sustainable development and public politics [145,146]. Table 8 lists the 20 most frequently used keywords in the 1832 articles on CSR's sustainable approach during the period 2001-2018.…”

Envisioning the ‘Sharing City’: Governance Strategies for the Sharing Economy

“…The focus on set-theoretic relations in QCA allows addressing questions of necessity and sufficiency separately, and, at its core, of 'equifinality'-different configurations that result in the same observed outcome. QCA is an iterative process, involving rounds of within-case analysis and cross-case comparisons as well as inductive and deductive logics of theory development (for a fine-grained f-s QCA application in the field of CSR, see Halme et al 2018). The rigorous process and the different proven tools help to make analyses more reliable and comprehensible (e.g., Scholz et al 2016).…”

Corporate actors, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Earth System Governance: A research agenda

“…While extant research suggests that businesses increasingly recognize the various economic and strategic benefits from managing "triple bottom line" impacts, such approaches are predominantly driven by corporate assessments of the "business case for sustainability", rather than concerns for finding solutions to global challenges that may require departure from "business as usual" (Dyllick and Hockerts, 2002;Dyllick and Muff, 2016;Scheyvens et al, 2016;Shrivastava, 2018). Moreover, an extensive literature has studied how companies respond to various sustainability issues separately (Mura et al, 2018), yet there is very little research on whether they consider these issues systemically in an integrated manner (Halme et al, 2018;Whiteman et al, 2013). Acknowledging the three evaluation criteria of good, effective and equitable governance (Biermann et al, 2017), there is therefore a need to examine the role that national and international voluntary corporate governance codes as well as rules and regulations play in supporting the implementation of the SDGs.…”