How Political Actors Co‐Construct CSR and its Effect on Firms' Political Access: A Discursive Institutionalist View

Abstract

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.

The Management of Socio‐Political Issues and Environments: Toward a Research Agenda for Corporate Socio‐Political Engagement

“…The studies from Ho et al (2023), van den Broek (2023), and Blake et al (2023) clearly demonstrate the importance of different socio‐political stakeholders in CSPE. Drawing on these important studies, we believe that stakeholder research can benefit from using social‐movements theory, for example, as a lens for understanding how different populist movements can quickly create institutional frictions, and whether and how CSPE might address them.…”

“…For example, while den Hond et al (2014) theorized about the potential downsides of misalignment of CPA and CSR, there have yet to be any substantial empirical explorations of that phenomenon, although it has gained substantial popular attention. Thus, existing work, such as van den Broek's (2023) and Ho et al's (2023) articles in this special issue, have only gone so far as to explore CSR as a CPA‐like instrument. However, firms’ CSR and CPA may not always be aligned, and this nonalignment or misalignment may be inadvertent, emergent, or deliberate (e.g., ‘talking green while lobbying brown’), but we so far know little about if, when, how, and why firms inadvertently or deliberately separate or misalign their CPA and CSR.…”

“…CPA research in the management field can trace its roots to a variety of social-science disciplines, including political science, economics, and sociology. Specifically, a dominant political marketplace perspective (Bonardi et al, 2005;Katic and Hillman, 2023;Lenway et al, 2022) in this literature originates from positive political theory (e.g., Riker and Ordeshook, 1973) and public-choice economics (e.g., Buchanan, 1987;Tullock, 1972). Regarding the former, Epstein's (1969) seminal book -The Corporation in American Politicsstudied the role of CPA in changing the legal constraints facing large corporations, while Barnet and Müller (1974) examined the various roles of multinationals in influencing national governments.…”

“…Employing a discursive institutional perspective, van den Broek (2023) examines whether and how engagement in CSR increases firms’ access to policymakers in the European Union. Far from finding a straightforward relationship in which CSR serves as a reputational buffer for firms (as appears to be the case in the USA context), van den Broek uncovers that CSR's meaning is highly contested in the EU and that its value in the political arena is co‐constructed by firms, policymakers, and other interests to serve the interests of each.…”

Emergence of Hybrid CSR Models as a Conflict‐Driven Communicative Process in a Nordic Welfare State

“…Our paper contributes to society-centric, institutional research on CSR by refining emerging theory on the dynamics and politics of hybridization. First, our study pushes the boundary conditions of the emerging theory on hybridization by shifting the analytical focus to a context where the turn to explicit CSR is contentious and allegedly implicated in the ongoing political deconstruction of the institutional arrangements that characterize implicit CSR (Brammer et al, 2012;Gjølberg, 2010;Kinderman, 2012;Midttun et al, 2015). In this institutional context, we apprehend hybridization as a political process and identify two different modes of hybridization: one that works to disrupt and one that seeks to repair the institutional arrangements associated with implicit CSR.…”