PurposeThis paper empirically examines how firms have discursively adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More precisely, it studies firms' ability to constitute their organizational identity by way of associating their past, present, and future practices with the newly established Goals. By focussing on the temporal dynamics of change, this paper provides analytical clarity on the role “narrative fidelity”.Design/methodology/approachThe author collected all online available SDG-related communications, including financial and non-financial reports, of 29 large French multinationals throughout 2016 and 2017. These data were analysed using a systematic narrative approach incorporating open-ended coding cycles.FindingsFour narratives were distilled: the descriptive narrative, which promotes general knowledge; the past narrative, which reinterprets the organizational past by retelling and reviewing actions; the present narrative, which associates prevailing organizational strategies with new categories; and the future narrative, which articulates and prioritizes new ambitions.Originality/valueCurrent performativity theories in Corporate Social Responsibility scholarship focus solely on future narratives, such as “aspirational talk”, and fail to incorporate how revising and redefining past and present stories creates an imperative “fit” between an organization's identity and a new framework. This study goes beyond future narratives and contributes to our understanding of the dynamic nature of temporal narratives (past – present – future). By building on narrative fidelity, it shows how all four narratives are crucial, sequential steps that help build a new corporate identity.
This paper explores how corporate social responsibility (CSR) can incentivize political actors to increase firms' political access. Taking a discursive institutional perspective, I argue that the types of access negotiated depend on how political actors co‐construct the multiplicity of CSR meanings. To study this process, I focus on the empirical case of the European Union (EU), offering a novel analysis of event observations, policy documents, and interviews with Commission officials, Euro‐parliamentarians, and other stakeholders. I find that the value of CSR is highly contested in the EU political arena. I then elucidate four discursive strategies through which political actors interactively refined, reframed, and reinterpreted the meaning of CSR and its relevance for firm access in ways beneficial to their perceived interests. The findings highlight the importance for nonmarket strategy studies to conceptualize CSR as a co‐constructed idea and access as negotiated, putting the micro‐dynamic relationship between firms and political actors centre stage.
Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gone “mainstream,” the relationship between CSR and corporate political activities (CPA) has received little scholarly attention. This is problematic because firms potentially have a more sizable impact through their lobbying activities for socially and environmentally beneficial (or unbeneficial) public policies than through their own operations. This paper investigates if, and how, UN Global Compact signatory firms differ in their policy preferences on key EU proposals compared to other interest groups. To capture state-of-the-art data on firms’ policy preferences, I draw from the INTEREURO database, which includes firms’ lobbying positions on forty-three directives and twenty-seven regulations covering 112 public policy issues in the European Union. Statistical results show that Global Compact signatory firms significantly lobby for stricter regulation than non-signatory firms and industry associations, however, their positions are still lower than nonbusiness groups. These results are similar across various public policy issues and suggest that the regulatory preferences of firms’ participating in soft law CSR initiatives are more aligned with stakeholders' interests. This paper contributes to public policy literature exploring the relationship between hard and soft law as well as literature studying the political representation of divergent interest.
In this paper, we investigate how a network of informal intermediariesincluding international organizations, consultancies, business alliances, and standard settershas contributed to the persistence of the universalistic meaning of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs). Based on our analysis of 26 interviews and 121 online resources produced by the 22 most prominent intermediaries, we find that SDG diffusion is distinct from linear depictions, such as the regulator-intermediarytarget model. This is because the intermediary network acts via three dynamic mechanisms that lend to an inclusive meaning of the goals; the core intermediaries lead efforts to make the perspective one that can accommodate a range of different audiences and activities, then intermediaries who subsequently join the network accept that broad perspective. Concomitant to their making or taking of the perspective, each intermediary individually works to retrofit the SDGs onto their unique tools and activities and to create their spot within the network. The combination of perspective making and taking, and retrofitting, propels the persistence of the SDGs as a "North Star" rather than a more specific blueprint for companies.
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