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India is the first country to have mandated compulsory corporate social responsibility (CSR) spends through changes in its legislative framework. Focus has thus shifted from the “why” to the “how” of CSR and, therefore, a shift in the “locus” of CSR responsibility from the “influencer” chief executive officer toward the “implementer” CSR professionals. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of management education in developing individual competencies among the implementers and impacting effective CSR implementation.

This paper, using a case study design, studies the role of management education in developing individual competencies among the implementers and impacting effective CSR implementation. Building on theoretical frameworks, this paper carries out an exploratory research of an Indian business school’s management education program for development practitioners. It uses qualitative inputs gathered from relevant stakeholders of the program to understand the role of management education in facilitating the paradigm shift in CSR in the Indian context.

The paper finds that the program has impacted outcomes at three levels, namely through developing key individual CSR-related competencies; impacting participants’ professional performance; and organizational impact in effective CSR implementation.

The case study provides a roadmap to business schools for designing and implementing programs for CSR professionals.

Extant research in the Indian context is silent on key competencies required for CSR implementation and also on the role of management education in developing the same. Such competencies can ensure the efficiency of the expected large CSR spends by private corporates under the new legal requirements and alter the country’s social development path.

India has recently entered mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) spend era. It is important to unravel the pressures of CSR implementation in the Indian context to understand how a better fit between business strategy and CSR spend can be achieved. This study aims to validate a model that integrates pressures, CSR implementation and financial performance through reputation within the institutional theory framework.

It is based on a questionnaire survey of 162 top-level and middle-level CSR managers in India and semi-structured interviews with eight top-level executives.

The study concludes that local community, government, peers and media are important institutional pressures of CSR implementation in India. Reputation partially mediates the relationship between CSR implementation and financial performance.

The study findings can help managers to know which stakeholders (government, media, peers and local community) are exerting statistically significant institutional pressures and how CSR initiatives be designed to cater to their requirements. Though CSR spend is mandatory in India, a strategic orientation towards it would enable the firms to derive value for the stakeholders associated with the business.

Relationship between pressures of CSR and CSR implementation has not yet been explored in the Indian context. Such a relationship tells us why is CSR taken up and influence of which of the pressure groups is considered important while implementing CSR. The study will help to understand the relationship between CSR–reputation–financial performance as perceived by Indian managers and to assess whether they perceive corporate reputation building as one of the most important outcomes of CSR.

CSR is seen as a constant source of debate in the research of company laws and has attracted wide attention from scholars. It is at the forefront of strategic outlook of contemporary organisations of all kinds. It is associated with the conduct of corporations and whether corporations owe a duty to stakeholders other than shareholders has been debated at various times. The CSR concept itself is not a new one and the social responsibilities of business in a market society has been discussed for decades, long before globalisation became a catchword. However, globalisation has been seen as a new phenomenon that affects our everyday life and the business life. New social networks with mutual dependences are created, thus leading to emerging new responsibilities. Community, work and capital are losing their home and locus and we are confronted with different cultures and life styles, whereas society is pluralised and common traditions, cultural values and social certainties emerge into a melting pot of various values and life styles.

This exploratory study aims to investigate how the role of the CSR manager is influenced by his orientation to corporate social responsibility (CSR) responsibilities, his attitude and competency.

The study involved 112 managers of CSR-implementing companies in the Klang Valley, a highly industrialized region in Malaysia. They were chosen based on a systematic random sampling technique.

The study found that the level of role, orientation and competency of CSR managers was high, whereas that for attitude was moderate. Further, regression analysis results showed that the managers’ orientation to economic and ethical responsibilities as well as competency significantly influenced their role in CSR with an explanatory power of 20.1 per cent.

The study was cross-sectional in nature. Nevertheless, it involved a sample of company managers from a selected location in the country. The predictor variables were limited to orientation to economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities; attitude; and competency.

The study highlights the importance of personal qualities of the manager and also the manager’s role in promoting community development CSR. These findings should be capitalized on by managers and other practitioners in CSR.

The study findings contribute to research on CSR that is viewed from the perspective of corporate image being projected by the role of CSR managers, as influenced by their CSR orientation, attitude and competency. Recommendations for CSR and human resource development practice and future research on the predictors of the role of CSR managers are proposed.

This paper aims to investigate, using stakeholder map methodology, showing power, urgency, legitimacy and concerns of different actors, the current state of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Switzerland. Previous research on CSR in Europe has made few attempts to identify stakeholders and their contribution to this topic.

To derive this map, publicly available documents were explored, augmented by 27 interviews with key stakeholders (consumers, media, government, trade unions, non-profit organisations [NPOs], banks, certifiers and consultants) and management of different companies (multinational enterprises [MNEs], small- and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] and large national companies). Using MAXQDA, the quantified codes given for power, legitimacy and urgency were triangulated between self-reporting, external assessments and statements from publicly available documents and subsequently transferred into stakeholder priorities or, in other words, into positions in the map. Further, the codes given in the interviews for different CSR interests and the results from the document analysis were linked between stakeholders. The identified concerns and priorities were quantitatively analysed in regard to centrality and salience using VennMaker.

The paper identified SMEs, MNEs and cooperating NPOs as being the most significant stakeholders, in that order. CSR is, therefore, not driven primarily by regulators, market pressure or customers. Further network parameters substantiated the importance of SMEs while following an unconventionally informal and idiosyncratic CSR approach. Hence, insights into these ethics-driven, unformalised business models that pursue broader responsibility based on trust, traditional values, regional anchors and the willingness to “give something back” were formed. Examples of this strong CSR habit include democratic decisions and abolished hierarchies, handshake instead of formal contracts and transparency in all respects (e.g. performance indicators, salaries and bonuses).

In total, 27 interviews as primary data that supplements publicly available documents are clearly only indicative.

The research found an innovative, vibrant and practical CSR model that is emerging for reasons other than conventional CSR agendas that are supposed to evolve. In fact, the stakeholder map and the CSR practices may point at a very different role businesses have adopted in Switzerland. Such models offer a useful, heuristic evaluation of the contribution of formal management systems (e.g. as could be found in MNEs) in comparison to the unformalised SME business conduct.

A rarely reported and astonishing feature of many of the very radical SME practices found in this study is that their link to commercial strategies was, in most cases, not seen. However, SMEs are neither the “poor relative” nor the abridged version of CSR, but are manifesting CSR as a Swiss set of values that fits the societal culture and the visionary goals of SME owners/managers and governs how a sustainably responsible company should behave. Hence, as a new stance and argument within CSR-related research, this paper concludes that “informal” does not mean “weak”. This paper covers a myriad of management fields, e.g. CSR as strategic tool in business ethics; stakeholder and network management; decision-making; and further theoretical frameworks, such as transaction cost and social capital theory. In other words, this research closes scientific gaps by at once applying quantitative as well as qualitative methods and by merging, for the first time, network methodology with CSR and stakeholder research.