Pan-European approach some implications of national agendas for CSR

Abstract

An increasing number of businesses are embracing the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as they recognise that the world they confront presents a growing array of demands and pressures that are not signalled through markets or the traditional political processes on which they have relied for so long. By its very nature CSR is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon arising at the interface of business and society. Moreover, the issues covered by the CSR agenda raise important questions about the role and responsibilities of business and the capacity of managers and companies to respond to the challenge of those new roles and responsibilities. The perspective taken in this paper is that CSR involves companies in organisational change as they learn ways to interact with new and enlarged sets of stakeholders and develop responses to their concerns, pressures and expectations. CSR can be seen to involve generic as well as context-specific aspects. Generic aspects of CSR centre on the notion that the adoption of new roles and responsibilities demands a process of organisational change and the development of routines to manage those demands. This process implies a need to appreciate the demands and pressures on the organisations, to acknowledge, make sense of, and prioritise the areas for change, and, gain the commitment of members of the organisation to that process and the new ways of thinking and routines it demands. This in turn requires the direction of change to be signalled and communicated through some statement of vision of what the organisation needs to become, and, to prepare for that change through a strategy or plan which sets targets, allocates resources, provides for the managerial and organisational competence and sets in motion a process to move the organisation and its members toward the chosen vision. This strategy is then implemented through action programmes, which are supported by a system to monitor and review progress toward specific targets and the broader vision as a basis for the development of new plans and/or to review the vision itself. These aspects of CSR as organisational change are not held to be controversial. Identification of the elements of a vision, making commitment and gaining commitment of others, formulating and implementing a strategy leading to performance on CSR issues (and other unintended out comes) that feed into a cycle of review and reflection is well established in business.The source of fascination (and frustration) for researchers and managers stems less from the elements of this generic model and more from the specific issues in managing CSR as organisational change. These issues focus around questions such as: 1. How does the practice of CSR differ from the generic model outlined above? 2. What processes for stakeholder engagement are effective? 3. What institutional and other factors influence the adoption of CSR practices by companies? 4. What processes are effective in gaining commitment to CSR as organisational change? 5. Why do some organisations effect change better than others? 6. How do managers make sense of, rationalise, or develop a business case for CSR? 7. What capabilities and competencies support organisational performance in CSR? 8. How do companies integrate CSR with mainstream business practices? 9. How are choices made when there are conflicts between CSR issues and more conventional business choices? Although these questions about the rationale, process and repertoires of CSR are critically important for research, policy and practice the purpose of this paper is to address more basic context-specific issues. To this end the paper explores what constitutes the overall field or agenda of CSR and how far this agenda and the response it elicits from companies, is shaped by national culture and institutions as norms, values, customs and rules. It is proposed that this most basic line of inquiry is a cornerstone to understanding the phenomenon of CSR and its managerial, organisational and social implications in a pan-European or international context. Indeed, the paper addresses two intersecting themes of this book. The first is the great variety of issues, managerial choice and practices, which defines corporate social responsibility (CSR) in European firms. The second is the extent to which it is possible to detect patterns in the issues of and approaches to CSR in Europe and how far these are accounted for by the national (cultural and institutional) origins of firms and their senior managers. While CSR practice reflects the fact that companies are assuming new roles and responsibilities, when viewed from a European perspective, the CSR agenda contains a wide set of issues. This is not a trivial issue. CSR is a complex, dynamic agenda. It has so many different dimensions that no company can claim mastery of these issues, making it an extremely difficult phenomenon to research. With this background the paper is structured in three sections. The first section reviews different perspectives on CSR and how they relate to notions such as the socially, environmentally and financially sustainable enterprise. This section seeks to demarcate the overarching agenda of CSR issues. The second section reviews the factors that influence this agenda and how these issues appear to translate in to company practices in different European countries. The paper concludes with acall for the development of a research framework for empirical comparative research that provides a basis to measure and compare CSR practices within European firms.