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This qualitative paper is about social reporting in response to an incident that involved the loss of human life. It examines Loblaw’s disclosures following the Rana Plaza building collapse that killed over 1,100 Bangladeshi workers.

This article draws on Suchman’s (1995) comprehensive legitimacy typology to interpret Loblaw’s disclosures about the collapse in both mass media coverage of the tragedy and the company’s quarterly, annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.

Loblaw worked on many fronts to secure stakeholders’ support in the aftermath of the fatal incident. Through their social disclosures, Loblaw simultaneously managed exchange, dispositional, consequential, procedural, structural, personal and cognitive legitimacy, striving to demonstrate that, notwithstanding the incident, the company was still conforming to its social contract.

This research operationalizes all aspects of Suchman’s legitimacy typology in the context of social reporting. In particular, the paper further develops the concept of cognitive legitimacy. This should be of benefit to other CSR researchers.

The loss of human life during business operations is one of the most terrible events an organization can face. Corporate activities leading to loss of human life are obviously far from being socially acceptable. Stakeholders are likely to disapprove such activities and reconsider their support, which can threaten the survival of the organization. It is thus of utmost importance to understand the strategies used by corporate managers in their attempt to secure ongoing stakeholder support.

This paper innovates by focusing specifically on social disclosures about a negative event. In so doing, it also contributes to a small, but important, literature within CSR research that examines incidents resulting in the loss of human life. The paper adapts and applies Suchman’s legitimacy framework to interpret social reporting in response to a specific instance of loss of life, the Rana Plaza building collapse. Finally, this paper mobilizes the notion of cognitive dissonance to further develop Suchman’s notion of cognitive legitimacy.

This e-book sheds light on the concept of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) in supply chains within a developing country context. This paper aims to investigate cognitive antecedents as well as behavioral consequences of corporate executives toward investing in strategic CSR. Moreover, it displays if and how strategic CSR contributes to creating performance benefits for the supplier.

This study is qualitative and exploratory in its nature. After drafting a five-dimensional framework from extant literature, it empirically elaborates on a case-study analysis based on primary data gathered through semi-structured interviews on ten executives (i.e. top executives, directors, owners) in large-size supplier companies within the Bangladeshi ready-made garment (RMG) supply chain.

First, it highlights altruism and performance as being cognitively and theoretically espoused in strategic CSR; yet, one appears to oust the other. Second, it demonstrates that if CSR-driven investments allow for a competitive positional betterment, as for suppliers in the Bangladeshi RMG industry, profit-driven CSR diffuses at the expense of altruism. Third, it confirms CSR’s strategic role as necessary but not sufficient for competitive advantage, delivering insights on suppliers’ future posture vis-à-vis CSR in the Bangladeshi RMG supply chains.

The e-book investigates strategic CSR’s struggle to maintain a balance between moral and profit-maximization motives at the cognitive level but being paradoxically required in supply chains. A limitation, inter alia, entails the focus on the horizontal perspective of the sample and the RMG supply chain.

The e-book provides valuable theoretical and practical insights by capitalizing on unique data retrieved from the Bangladeshi supply chain.

This research paper aims to explore whether and how perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) influences employee-associated outcomes in ways that are controllable by managers. Drawing from the theories of self-determination and social identity, this study investigates the mediating effects of psychological needs fulfillment and organizational identification in exploring the mechanisms that link perceived CSR to employee job performances of Chinese state-owned tourism companies.

Survey was used to collect original data from ten Chinese state-owned tourism companies to examine the proposed model. Data was analyzed through structural equation modeling.

Employees’ perceptions of CSR are found to demonstrate significantly effective associations with their job performance. Moreover, results support that the influences of CSR on staff’s job performance are also conveyed through psychological needs fulfillment (competence) and organizational identification (i.e. cognitive identification and affective identification).

Findings not only provide strategic ideas and operational tactics for tourism managers to devise CSR strategies and allocate CSR resources but also offer inspirations to integrate CSR initiatives with human resource management strategies.

This study diverts the research of CSR from the organizational level to the individual level. This study also explores the mechanism of psychological needs fulfillment and organizational identification underlying processes in the employee perceptions of CSR–job performance linkages.

This paper aims to examine whether and how internal and external typologies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employees’ CSR participation (CSRP) differentially impact organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and turnover intentions (TI), mediated by meaningful work (MW) and affective commitment (AC) and moderated by CSR motive attributions.

Bootstrapped structural equation modeling using AMOS and mediation and moderation analysis using Hayes’ Process macro in SPSS are performed on a sample of 193 employees from diverse industries in India.

The CSR-work outcomes relationship is rather multifaceted. Internal CSR (ICSR) and CSRP directly promote the meaningfulness of work and AC. Further, all three kinds of CSR (ICSR, external CSR (ECSR) and CSRP) influence work behaviors (OCB and TI) sequentially via MW and AC. Intrinsic (extrinsic) CSR attributions strengthen (weaken) the positive effect of ECSR on MW. Nevertheless, the conditional indirect effects could not be established, warranting further investigation.

The management must elevate employees’ CSR awareness allowing them to partake in the planning and execution of CSR programs that are authentic, righteous and seamlessly unified with core business activities to nurture work meaningfulness and positive employee attitudes and behaviors.

This is the foremost study that involves a bibliometric analysis of employee-based CSR research and a systematic meta-analytic review of the relationship between CSR and meaningfulness from employees’ perspectives. The present study is novel as it divulges an integrative framework about how employees’ CSR perceptions, participation/volunteering and attributions collectively influence the work outcomes at three levels (namely, cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral), drawing on sensemaking, needs and justice-based views, social identity, social exchange and attribution theories. Thus, new nuances are added to extant micro-CSR literature.

Anchored in institutional theory and sense-making theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the multinational corporations (MNC) subsidiary level in a developing country context.

This paper follows a qualitative methodology and adopts the interview technique to investigate the CSR practices of eight MNCs.

The results suggest that the CSR diffusion process goes well beyond simple imitation (i.e. adopting CSR myths or best practices intact), involving complex processes of interpretation and translation at the subsidiary level to reconcile the multiple and contradictory expectations for CSR.

The paper illustrates the dynamics of the sense-making process at the level of the subsidiary and the numerous institutional factors that are accounted for while implementing CSR activities in the host community. This paper argues that the integration of the two theories helps bridge macro and micro levels of analysis, thus providing a much richer account of how organizational actors at the subsidiary level make “sense” of a multitude of institutional pressures in the process of CSR implementation stemming from within the MNC itself on one hand (and the respective home country) and from the host community on the other hand.

This purpose of this article is to identify important factors that influence consumers’ responses to pro-social loyalty programs (pro-social LPs). These positive marketing programs reflect represent an emerging phenomenon in relationship marketing associated with companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The test of the proposed model relied on data from 350 US consumers, obtained through web-based experiments. Data analysis was performed using structural equation modeling.

The results showed that consumers’ CSR-driven cognition (CSR beliefs) and reciprocal emotion (feeling of gratitude) enhance their attitudes toward pro-social LPs and increased participation intentions. The perceived value of pro-social LPs also improved consumer attitudes and participation intentions.

Pro-social LPs offer a noteworthy approach to relationship marketing that benefits both service providers that engage in CSR and society overall.

This study contributes to the literature on LP and CSR by investigating the roles of CSR-driven cognition, reciprocal emotion and value perception in explaining consumers’ responses to an innovative approach of LPs and pro-social LPs.

The purpose of this corporate social responsibility (CSR) paper is to investigate specific social roles of multinational corporations (MNCs) in a developing economy, and how these MNCs’ CSR marketing activities are legitimized, from the institutional perspective.

Anchoring this study in institutional theory, the authors explore how formal and informal institutions affect the legitimacy of MNCs’ CSR marketing practices in the host country of Pakistan. The authors conducted interviews with top managers from 15 local MNCs undertaking CSR programs in various sectors, such as automotive, banking, consumer products, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications.

The authors find that MNCs show commitment to CSR programs despite underdeveloped and very weak formal institutions, and that lots of these initiatives such as education, health, environmental protection, and civil society/religious organizations are oriented toward norms-based social CSR marketing, i.e. charitable and philanthropic work, civil society-led social media and religious groups also force MNCs to spend more on CSR marketing initiatives. MNCs follow headquarters’ global CSR marketing strategies and adapt their CSR programs to the host country’s norms, focussing on their product brand value related CSR marketing. However, the MNCs have not taken an integrated approach to CSR marketing, considering the overall institutional environment of the host country.

On the basis of very weak regulatory constraints on CSR marketing activities, MNCs have the propensity to develop normatively acceptable CSR marketing under very weak formal institutional pressures. The findings suggest the need for developing an integrative approach to the CSR strategies of MNCs, comprehensively incorporating regulatory, economic, and socio-cultural as well as various stakeholders’ perspectives.

The authors take the institution-based approach to MNCs’ CSR marketing in the context of the developing economy, which extends the extant MNC and international marketing literature. Particularly, MNCs’ CSR marketing legitimacy depends highly on the adaptation to local norms, leading to the importance of the normative pillar of institutionalization in developing economies.

Bridging noted gaps in the sharing economy and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how an organization-sponsored sharing platform – a new class of information technology (IT) and the sharing economy ideal – is given meaning as a CSR program for internal stakeholders.

The research involves phone interviews conducted with site coordinators of the Zimride by Enterprise® ridesharing platform in 25 organizations.

This case study reveals that two component processes of organizational sensemaking – sensegiving and sensebreaking – are underlying micromechanisms used by organizations to enact a sponsored sharing platform as a CSR program. Qualitative analyses demonstrate that every meaning given to Zimride remained open to sensebreaking during its implementation. As such, site coordinators were continuously drawn into sensemaking about Zimride’s cognitive, linguistic and conative dimensions as a CSR program and had to exert ongoing effort to stabilize its socially (re)constructed meaning within their organization. Furthermore, site coordinators’ sensegiving narrative about Zimride was often undermined by their sensebreaking communications and organizational actions, albeit unintentionally.

Sponsoring a sharing platform to facilitate collaborative consumption can deliver triple bottom line benefits for both organizations and their members, but it may not. The key to accruing this potential shared value lies is how site coordinators navigate organizational sensemaking about these IT-enabled CSR programs.

This paper provides valuable insights into these sensemaking processes and develops a prescriptive framework for enacting an organization-sponsored sharing platform as a CSR program.

This paper aims to juxtapose two separate perspectives on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in terms of their ability to explain the cognitive alignment between managers and stakeholders on what constitutes the social responsibility of the focal firm, and to explain social performance.

The authors take two perspectives: that of stakeholder engagement, which has historically characterized the debate on CSR; and that of internal change processes required to integrate CSR in a firm's operations. The authors analyze data from 427 interviews, of which 209 were with managers and 219 with stakeholders of 19 multinational firms in eight sectors, to assess the extent of cognitive alignment between managers and stakeholders on the conceptualization of CSR for the relevant firm, to determine which of the two theoretical perspectives is connected with the degree of cognitive alignment, and to determine which of the two is connected with the perception of corporate social performance (CSP).

The data examined show no evidence that the degree of sophistication in stakeholder engagement practices is connected with either the magnitude of cognitive gaps, or the level of CSP; whereas the degree of integration in internal operations is connected with both narrower cognitive gaps and higher CSP.

This paper tackles for the first time the problem of measuring and explaining the gaps between managers and stakeholders about their cognitive representations of CSR. The key result of the analysis is that the standard conceptualization of CSR as a stakeholder engagement process does not suffice neither to explain the variation across firms in their managers' cognitive alignment with stakeholders, nor to explain inter‐firm variation in social performance. The strongest explanation for both alignment and performance comes from the extent to which the firm has actually invested in internal change processes aimed at integrating the principles of CSR in the operations and strategies of the firm.

To succeed in today’s dynamic and unpredictable business world, businesses are increasingly required to gain the trust of and inform the society in which they operate about the social and environmental consequences of their actions. Corporations’ claims regarding the responsibility and ethicality of their actions, however, have been shown to be contradictory to some degree. We define corporations’ deceitful implementation of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies as pseudo-CSR. We argue that it is the moral characteristics of individuals, i.e. employees, managers and other decision-makers who ignore the CSR policies, which produce pseudo-CSR.

This is a conceptual paper.

The authors conceptualize the gap between true CSR and pseudo-CSR on a cognitive individual level as “moral laxity,” resulting from organization-induced lack of effort concerning individual moral development through ethical discourse, ethical sensemaking and subjectification processes. The absence of these processes prohibits individuals in organizations from constructing ethical identities to inhibit pseudo-CSR activities.

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR by augmenting corporate-level responsibility with the hitherto mostly neglected, yet significant, role of the individual in bridging this gap.