The Political Economy of CSR in Western Europe
Author
Atle Mittunm, Kristin Gautesen, Maria Gjolber
Source
Corporate Governance Journal
Category
Corporate Responsibility and Public Policy
Discipline
International Political Economy
Purpose – The increasing engagement in corporate social
responsibility (CSR) potentially indicates an attempt to “re-embed” the
economy in a wider societal context, following a period of neoliberal
market exposure, deregulation, and separation of commercial and
societal concerns. The purpose of this paper is to explore the
relationship between this new social embedding of the economy and older
traditions of social embeddedness, such as the welfare state,
neocorporatist arrangements, and other socio-political and labour
market arrangements.
Design/methodology/approach – The
paper explores the relationship between old and new embeddedness by
examining how 17 West European nations and the USA are ranked on “old”
embeddedness dimensions and comparing this ranking with “new” CSR
rankings of nationally aggregated industrial performance.
Findings – The
overall findings at an aggregate level provides some support for the
idea of a symmetric relationship between the “old”, politically-driven
embeddedness and the “new”, industry-driven embeddedness. However, a
finer inspection of the results reveals interesting diversity and
variation between countries and between scores, indicating more complex
national story lines.
Research limitations/implications – Despite
the limited set of countries and some measurement challenges, the
analysis illustrates that the patterns of national industrial
adaptation to the CSR agenda is strongly shaped by regional and
national institutional contexts. While some of the institutional
patterns shaping CSR in the “old” EU 15++ have been analysed in this
paper, much work still remains to be done in extending and deepening
our knowledge in this field.
Practical implications – The
findings may help understand how a general framework like CSR
interplays with political and institutional contexts as it trickles
down into different West European political economies.
Originality/value – The
systematic analysis of old political and new corporate social
embeddedness of the economy based on a broad set of indicators is new
and sheds light on the institutional preconditions for- and shaping of
CSR.
»
|
Twitter
RSS Feed
