From CSR policies to situated CSR: invisible responsibility practices in nursing homes

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is commonly conceptualized at the strategic or policy level, emphasizing formal commitments, governance mechanisms and reporting practices (Porter & Kramer, 2011; Frej & Bétourné, 2024). However, such approaches tend to overlook how responsibility is enacted in everyday organizational situations. Recent research on care management highlights the importance of relational practices and ethical attention to vulnerability in responsible organizations (Arras-Djabi, Brasseur & Maisonnasse, 2022; Gil & Plane, 2025). This article introduces the concept of Situated CSR to capture how responsibility emerges in concrete work situations through the practices and judgments of frontline professionals. Drawing on qualitative data collected in nursing homes, the study examines how care workers enact responsibility in response to residents' vulnerability and organizational constraints. The analysis shows that responsibility in care organizations largely relies on implicit competences mobilized in everyday care practices, such as relational adjustments, moral judgments and collective coordination among professionals. These practices remain largely invisible in formal CSR frameworks, which privilege managerial policies over situated action. By shifting attention from CSR as policy to CSR as situated practice, the article proposes the concept of Situated CSR as a new analytical lens for understanding responsibility in organizations where ethical action emerges primarily through relational and context-dependent work.