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This chapter examines public versus private sector roles in addressing CSR/Sustainability issues in the United States. It provides an historical perspective on the primacy of market-driven corporate practice in the United States and recent moves by the state to “balance” private and public interests through both regulatory and non-regulatory means. A typology of government and business roles, based on “who leads” and “who makes the rules,” illustrates shared governance of CSR/Sustainability in a variety of multisector and public–private partnerships.

Case studies examine how the U.S. government interacts with business and NGOs and its varied roles in the shared governance of sustainability. Examples from field interviews with business leaders in global operator General Electric (Global Business Initiative on Human Rights), apparel maker-and-seller Patagonia (Aquatic “Hitchhikers”), electronics retailer Best Buy (product recycling), IBM (global corporate volunteering), and others illustrate varieties of shared governance between business and the state in operation today.

Depending on “who leads” and “who makes the rules,” there are variations in whether responsible actions by the private sector are regulatory versus voluntary and whether government’s role involves mandating, partnering, facilitating, or endorsing private sector efforts. Successful shared governance depends on business’s “license to cooperate” and the multiple parties’s sharing responsibility for their goals, operations, and results.

There is a substantial literature on multi-business CSR-related networks and on business–NGO partnerships. Less attention has been given to the role of governments in this space, particularly in the United States where, partly for historical reasons, a company’s relationship with and obligations to society have been regarded as discretionary more so than regulatory activity and where government intervention in markets and in the affairs of companies has been sharply resisted, particularly by business interests, and is suspect among the citizenry.

This paper seeks to investigate the influence of government and foreign affiliates, particularly; multinational companies on corporate social reporting (CSR) development in an economy, where CSR awareness is low coupled with weak pressure group activism.

This is a cross sectional study that focuses on the information contained in the annual reports for year 2002/2003. This research uses content analysis as method to measure the extent CSR.

Based on regression analysis, the study evidences on the impact of government influence. However, the impact of foreign affiliation variables is not evident. Institutionalisation of the government's aspirations and commitment to CSR is perhaps the most appropriate description for Malaysian CSR practice.

There are two main limitations of this study. Firstly, this study examines the annual reports for one year. Secondly, this study is annual reports centric. It does not examine any other stand alone reports that the respondents might have produced on the subject of society and the environment.

This study provides justification for government's role in promoting CSR practice. The impact is evidenced although there are no direct concerted efforts at that time by the government in respect of CSR policy implementation. The significant role is attributed to the unique Malaysian socio economic structure.

This study contributes to the CSR literature particularly in the context of economies where governments play a significant role in promoting economic development. It provides empirical evidence of the influence of government and foreign affiliates. It also adds to the literature by explaining the phenomenon from the Institutional perspective and its relevance to a developing economy.

The purpose of this article is to explore the problematic question of government's role in ensuring corporate social responsibility in an African context. This question may initially appear paradoxical yet it is becoming increasingly relevant in the face of linkages between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and development. The article uses the example of Nigeria's attempt to pass a CSR bill mandating contributions towards development to identify several questions arising in such contexts. It advises a contextual approach to identifying CSR objectives and recognises the need for frameworks which law can provide.

This article adopts a conceptual approach analysing the current debates about CSR and its linkage with development as well as the implications and issues raised by the attempted CSR law.

The main findings suggest that though CSR in general refers to business and society relationships, its content and targets need to be defined in context. Attempts to pass mandatory CSR laws (even where they do not succeed), hint at the need to concretise objectives particularly where CSR is linked to development. This can be done through frameworks which include the use of law in all its forms.

This article identifies a new direction that CSR may be taking in developing countries. It uses the Nigerian example to show that larger questions are looming for CSR, especially in connection with development. While current attempts to adopt a structured approach to CSR through legislation may not be wholly successful, they cannot be entirely ignored as this suggests the need for frameworks and concrete objectives in an African context like Nigeria.

This study aims to explore multifaceted corporate social responsibility (CSR) covered in popular English newspapers in the UK, USA, mainland China and Hong Kong from 2000 to 2016 via a computer-assisted analytical approach. This study moves the understanding of CSR away from corporate self-reporting to the mass media and raises interesting questions about the role of the news media in presenting CSR as a multifaceted, socially constructed concept.

Data were retrieved from CSR-related news articles from 2000 to 2016 that were archived in the LexisNexis database. Guided by the theoretical framework of agenda setting, a computer-assisted content analysis (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was used to analyze 4,487 CSR-related articles from both business and non-business news sources. Analysis of variance was used to compare salient CSR topics in each country/region.

This study identifies newspapers as an alternate to corporations’ attempts to distribute CSR information and construct CSR meaning. The findings revealed that the news communicates a variety of CSR issues that are aligned or beyond what CSR was defined in corporate CSR reporting, as suggested in previous studies. In addition, CSR news coverages differ between the business and nonbusiness news sources. Furthermore, the media tone of CSR coverage significantly differed across the regions and between the business and nonbusiness newspapers.

Emerging topics in CSR news coverage, such as business education, could help companies identify untapped CSR realms in the market.

This study contributes to CSR communication research by adding a non-corporate perspective regarding what CSR means and should be focused on. The news media presents CSR using a heterogeneous approach as they not only provide surface reports on corporations’ CSR activities but also offer in-depth discussions.

The paper seeks to explore how globalization processes have shaped the nature, scope, and time frame of considerations of social responsibility and the development of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) regime. The paper identifies three generations of human rights' values embedded within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and aims to argue that they inspire and influence contemporary discussions about, and practices of CSR.

Employing the emergence of the human rights regime as a paradigmatic case comparison, the interrelationships of states, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations in the development of new conceptions and expectations of, and organizations for CSR were explored.

The paper finds strong parallels between the growth of the global human rights regime and the burgeoning international attention paid to issues of CSR and sustainability. Four critical stages are identified: the formal articulation of norms, the increasing role of NGOs, changing power dynamics between state, NGOs, and multinational corporations, and the reconfiguration of network density and diversity.

The paper suggests that attention to the communicative processes associated with the development of the international human rights regime provides important insights for the future development of a global CSR regime.

Through the introduction of the three generations of human rights discourse, communicative actions and pathways from which a global corporate social responsibility regime may emerge were articulated.

Principal‐agent problems are largely responsible for poor corporate governance. Much work on private sector corporate governance reform seeks to address transparency, accountability and responsiveness to stakeholder interests under the new category of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Yet, these issues are not new. The public sector has been working on these issues for many years – especially in looking at ways of reducing malfeasance and also optimizing use of resources for the benefit of principals. Some lessons from public sector reform include promoting information dissemination, participation, and balancing powers between a corporation’s executive and supervisory entities. While firms should not necessarily be administered like governmental bodies, there are many lessons from public sector organizational reform and institutional governance that may be applicable to large‐scale public corporations.

This paper aims to explore the intermediary roles that public policies play in stimulating government agencies, businesses and civil society to engage in a corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda.

Issues related to decision-making of public policies are increasingly complex. Therefore, analytical hierarchy process has been used to prioritize public policy practices for CSR in the UAE. Data were collected from experts working in businesses and civil society organizations.

Findings suggest that businesses and the civil society confirm the importance of standardization and law enforcement public policy practices in issues related to CSR in developing countries. The endorsing style of public policies was the least important approach to encouraging CSR implementation in the UAE.

Results are derived from a limited amount of empirical data only in one country; therefore, these cannot be generalized. Future research from other countries is needed.

Outcomes from this study will help the government enhance its role as mediator among all agents and help with designing public policies that encourage adoption of CSR by business firms while maintaining competitiveness in the economy.

A framework consisting of five public policy categories – mandating, facilitating, partnering, endorsing and empowering roles – and 29 sub-policy practices is introduced. This study provides an important technique for analyzing the importance of public policies in promoting CSR. It offers insights into a population that shapes a CSR agenda.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in assisting firms in their response to public emergency crises under the integrated view of government emergency response.

Using event study and survival analysis method, the authors examine whether CSR can act as a stock price stabilizer for companies from China by splitting the stock price fluctuations into two phases – CSR price insurance, which decrease the shock on stock prices during the emergency crisis, and CSR price recovery, which helps stock prices rebound faster during the postcrisis phase.

The authors’ empirical results confirm the stabilizer role of CSR during crisis and that effective government response can strengthen such effect. Furthermore, the authors examine the different aspects of the government’s response and the impact of multiple waves of public emergency.

This study provides empirical evidence on the topic of CSR and the government’s response to public emergency under the emerging context.

This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.

In a state capitalist country such as China, an important influence on company reporting is the government, which can influence company decision-making. The nature and impact of how the Chinese government uses its symbolic power to promote corporate environmental reporting (CER) have been under-studied, and therefore, this paper aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating the various strategies the Chinese government uses to influence CER and how political ideology plays a key role.

This study uses discourse analysis to examine the annual reports and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports from seven Chinese companies between 2007 and 2011. And the data analysis presented is informed by Bourdieu's conceptualisation of symbolic power.

The Chinese government, through exercising the symbolic power, manages to build consensus, so that the Chinese government's political ideology becomes the habitus which is deeply embedded in the companies' perception of practices. In China, the government dominates the field and owns the economic capital. In order to accumulate symbolic capital, companies must adhere to political ideology, which helps them maintain and improve their social position and ultimately reward them with more economic capital. The findings show that the CER provided by Chinese companies is a symbolic product of this process.

The paper provides contributions around the themes of symbolic power wielded by the government that influence not only state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but also firms in the private sector. This paper also provides an important contribution to understanding, in the context of a strong ideologically based political system (such as China), how political ideology influences companies' decision-making in the field of CER.