Activism and Abdication on the Inside: The Effect of Everyday Practice on Corporate Responsibility

Abstract

While mainstream CSR research has generally explored and argued for positive ethical, social and environmental performance, critical CSR scholars argue that change has been superficial-at best, and not possible in any substantial way within the current capitalist system. Both views, however, only address the role of business within larger systems. Little attention has been paid to the everyday material CSR practice of individual managers. We go inside the firm to investigate how the micro-level acts of individual managers can aggregate to drive transformation of the macro-level business logic. We draw on the strategy-aspractice approach to organize our research. The study reveals two orientations towards the integration of personal ethics into the workplace: abdication and activism. These orientations are supported by managerial practice such as reproductive and coping tactics (abdication) and covert and overt tactics (activism); and, three enabling conditions of activist practice: empowerment and psychological safety, moral shock, and morality praxis. While our findings illustrate the tremendous challenges managers face when attempting to influence organizational practices towards their ethical and environmental aspirations, we also show that under specific conditions, individual managers can become fully engaged advocates and drivers of positive change from the inside. In so doing, our individual-level analysis of intrapreneurship provides a more complex picture of the possibilities for positive change than have been previously put forth by mainstream and critical CSR research.

How expected outcomes, stakeholders, and institutions influence corporate social responsibility at different levels of large basic needs firms

“…The fact that all management levels were consistent in their answers indicates that we avoided any source of bias. However, this result contrasts the literature on decoupling (Argento et al, ; Carrington et al, ; Crilly et al, ). We recommend that future research aims to better understand how and when the behavior of individual managers is coupled to firm policy and on what aspects (attributes) of CSR activities individual managers might depart.…”

“…As we do not have any theoretical reason to expect differences between management levels and their valuation of public health, we decided not to explore this effect further. The lack of differences between management levels shows that the sometimes deviant role displayed by middle‐managers (Carrington et al, ) did not influence their role as informant of the firm. Also, executives might be aware of the initiatives displayed by middle‐level managers and the influence it has on corporate policy (Argento et al, ; Powell, ).…”

“…At the firm level, executives formulate corporate CSR policy, whereas CSR activities are executed at the level of individual (middle-level) managers. In addition, managers can act as social intrapreneurs through their own initiatives (Carrington, Zwick, & Neville, 2018) and can even affect (CSR) policies at the firm level by strategic maneuvering (Argento, Culasso, & Truant, 2018;Rouleau & Balogun, 2011), diligence (Powell, 2017), and efforts to institutionalize and routinize CSR (Risi & Wickert, 2017). This means that both levels interact (Radaelli & Sitton-Kent, 2016).…”

CSR and Leadership Approaches and Practices: A Comparative Inquiry of Owners and Professional Executives

“…Managerial discretion and practice (De Cremer et al, 2011;Carrington et al, 2018;Legrand et al, 2018) is fundamentally important in defining CSR, particularly for the purpose of this study. Managerial discretion and practice (De Cremer et al, 2011;Carrington et al, 2018;Legrand et al, 2018) is fundamentally important in defining CSR, particularly for the purpose of this study.…”

The role of networks and sustainable intrapreneurship as interactive drivers catalyzing the adoption of sustainable innovation

“…Although evidence that networking and intrapreneurship might be important drivers of SI have been found (Carrington, Zwick, & Neville, 2018), current literature analyzes these drivers as silos, failing to put them in relation to other external and internal drivers that emerge from a systemic examination of the SI adoption process (Evans et al, 2017).…”