Beyond Good Intentions: Designing CSR Initiatives for Greater Social Impact

Abstract

Are corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives providing the societal good that they promise? After decades of CSR studies, we do not have an answer. In this review, we analyze progression of the CSR literature toward assessing the performance of CSR initiatives, identify factors that have limited the literature’s progress, and suggest a new approach to the study of CSR that can overcome these limits. We begin with comprehensive bibliometric mapping illustrating that although social impact has infrequently been its explicit focus, the CSR literature has measured outcomes other than firm performance, especially in the current decade. Thereafter, we conduct a more fine-grained analysis of recent CSR studies. Adapting a logic model framework, we show that even the most highly cited studies have stopped short of assessing social impact, often measuring CSR activities rather than impacts and focusing on benefits to specific stakeholders rather than to wider society. In combination, our analyses suggest that assessment of the performance of CSR initiatives has been driven by the availability of large, public secondary data sources. However, creating more such databases and turning to “big data” analyses are inadequate solutions. Drawing from the impact evaluation literature of development economics, we argue that the CSR field should reconceive itself as a science of design in which researchers formulate CSR initiatives that seek to achieve specific social and environmental objectives. In accordance with this pursuit, CSR researchers should move toward “small data” research designs, which will enable studies to better determine causation rather than just identify correlation.

Putting the “Love of Humanity” Back in Corporate Philanthropy: The Case of Health Grants by Corporate Foundations

“…Traditionally corporate philanthropy has been considered a form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which McWilliams and Siegel ( 2001 ) define as the private provision of public goods and which managers undertake if its benefits are greater than the costs. 1 Most research is confined to the financial impacts of CSR within the firm and fails to examine how those public goods are distributed (Barnett et al, 2020 ). So, it is necessary to look beyond a simple economic cost–benefit analysis of firm benefits to explain the distributional consequences of CSR initiatives, such as philanthropy by examining the regional preference(s) that foundations reveal when awarding CSR health-related philanthropic grants.…”

Something Old, Something New: Continuity and Change at Business & Society

“…Global society is increasingly grappling with grand challenges, such as climate change, human rights violation, global poverty, socioeconomic inequalities, mass migration, and institutional corruption, in which business is just one of the stakeholders that needs to work in tandem with public and civil society actors in efforts to seek better outcomes (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016). New conversations setting the stage for advancing research on issues that are critical to our society include such topics as sustainable development goals (e.g., Howard-Grenville et al, 2019), modern slavery (e.g., Caruana et al, 2019), human rights (e.g., Van Buren et al, 2019), stakeholder management (e.g., Barney & Harrison, 2018), social entrepreneurship (e.g., Rawhouser et al, 2019), social irresponsibility (e.g., Chiu & Sharfman, 2018), economic inequality (e.g., Bapuji et al, 2018), cross-sector partnerships (e.g., Bode et al, 2019), social impact measurement (e.g., Barnett et al, 2020), corporate governance (e.g., Brown et al, 2019), corporate political and corporate social responsibility (CSR) alignment (e.g., den Hond et al, 2014), and reporting-led organizational transformation (e.g., Higgins et al, 2019). As noted by the former editors, “We have a domain that is attracting more and more attention and a journal that is well-positioned to play a leading role in these important debates” (de Bakker et al, 2018, p. 1292).…”

Social Capital, Community Engagement, and Corporate Social Responsibility

“…Scholars have empirically shown that CSR can surely provide relational, reputational, and financial benefits to the firms (Fombrun et al 2000) but have hardly ever wanted to validate the assumed profit to the society in general. Many studies have exhaustively aimed to explain "if" (Orlitzky et al 2003), "how" (Peloza and Shang 2011), and 'why' (Grewatsch and Kleindienst 2017) it "pays to be good" but without giving due heed to how much "good" is actually produced for the society (Barnett et al 2020). Community involvement is also a method of stakeholder engagement.…”