Legitimizing Corporate Social Responsibility Governance

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) governance initiatives and instruments like ISO 26000, the European Multi-stakeholder Forum on CSR, or the National CSR Strategy of the German government have been created to address negative socio-economic and ecological effects associated with the globalized economy. CSR governance instruments are soft law and depend on a voluntary adoption and implementation by organizations. A crucial success factor of soft law is legitimacy, which enhances governance effectiveness by increasing the chances for norm adoption by the norm addressees. Yet, legitimacy has long been overseen by CSR governance research leaving its positive effects on public acceptability and governance compliance widely out of sight. We argue that the lack of legitimacy analysis in CSR governance research leads to an underestimation of the democratic, participatory potentials within global governance and of the potential empirical impacts of CSR governance instruments and initiatives. With this paper, we are contributing a normative concept as well as an empirical analysis of legitimacy designs of selected CSR governance initiatives. Empirical methods include document analyses, expert interviews, and participant observations. Our outcomes and recommendations provide scholars as well as practitioners with a better understanding of how to design and how to manage legitimized CSR governance approaches and thereby support the effectiveness of governance in the field of CSR.