How CSR generates market-standard and acceptable business practices for corporations

Companies face increasing pressure from stakeholders to play a leading role in addressing a wide array of environmental, social, and governance issues. This paper shows how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a negotiation process to help corporations manage uncertainties through collaborative work and alignment with stakeholders. In this way, CSR is a process that generates standard and acceptable business practices. Using an adductive as well as an interpretative approach, we look at CSR as a collaborative process that builds rules and norms. CSR is defined as a contractual process between stakeholders in order to drive decision making processes and agree on commitments between business and society. A framework is presented linking CSR business practices research findings to empirical market isomorphism. Interestingly, all studied examples depict the development of standard and acceptable business practices with very little involvement of stakeholders, which is not the understood way of driving changes to business strategy as defined by the CSR negotiation processes. Our analysis suggests that CSR in practice, is little more than the achievements of fragmented initiatives led by companies showing (limited) transparency toward external stakeholders. The paper concludes with recommendations that public authorities play a strategic role showing clear direction, and establish themselves as a strategic platform enabling more engagement between stakeholders.