What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

This article critiques Porter and Kramer's concept of creating shared value. The strengths of the idea are highlighted in terms of its popularity among practitioner and academic audiences, its connecting of strategy and social goals, and its systematizing of some previously underdeveloped, disconnected areas of research and practice. However, the concept suffers from some serious shortcomings, namely: it is unoriginal; it ignores the tensions inherent to responsible business activity; it is naive about business compliance; and it is based on a shallow conception of the corporation's role in society. [Michael Porter and Mark Kramer were invited to respond to this article. Their commentary follows along with a reply by Crane and his co-authors.]

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Contesting the value of "creating shared value"

orporate ethics programmes were like hummingbirds in the 1950s. You didn’t see one often and when you did it seemed too delicate to survive. Now, these curiosities have proved their sturdiness, flourishing and migrating steadily from their historical home in Europe and the US to Asia, Africa and Latin America. Most of the 500 largest corporations in the US now boast a code of ethics, and the proportion among a broader collection of US companies has risen to 80 per cent. Similarly, a recent study of FTSE 350 companies and nonquoted companies of equivalent size undertaken by the London Business School and Arthur Andersen showed that 78 per cent of the responding companies had a code of conduct, compared with 57 per cent three years ago. In the 1950s, ethics programmes were the personal creations of charismatic leaders, such as General Johnson who fashioned Johnson & Johnson’s Credo statement; today they are produced by a wide variety of organisations. They encompass not only written standards of conduct, but internal education schemes, formal agreements on industry standards, ethics offices, social accounting techniques and social projects. The popularity of ethics programmes raises several questions. Do they deliver what they promise in making companies more ethical? Do they aid companies in achieving traditional performance measures such as return on investment or customer satisfaction? And, should companies institute new programmes, or perhaps change the ones they have? The vogue for ethics programmes does not resolve the most common theoretical question asked of business ethics, namely, what counts as ethical? Even the socially screened investment movement that specialises in assessing stocks for ethical characteristics often seems confused. Consider the tendency of such funds to screen out the “sin” stocks of tobacco, alcohol and firearms. As a result, hightech stocks, ones unlikely to produce sinning products, have become darlings of such funds. But while Microsoft, for example, will probably never produce wine and so almost always finds itself on the screened funds’ lists, it has been found in violation of US anti-trust laws, a sin greater in some people’s eyes than fermenting grapes. Ethics programmes, however, offer a solution to the question of what is ethical by simply decreeing an answer. It makes little difference to Motorola whether other companies agree or disagree that its principle of “uncompromising integrity” prohibits even small payments in countries where bribery is common. Motorola is content to set the standard for itself. Similarly, programmes created by industries or international organisations decree their own rules, although they often make use of existing standards as templates. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) recent prohibitions on companies based in member countries from engaging in foreign bribery were developed through extensive discussion among participating countries, although they contain precepts seen earlier in the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Corporate ethics programmes have spread widely, yet no evidence suggests this growth is the result of a decline in standards. Studies indicate that between 25 and 60 per cent of employees in any given year admit to having seen ethical misbehaviour, depending upon the context in which the question is asked. What, then, has driven the ethics boom? Likely factors include the stronger focus by the media on corporate conduct, increased government pressure and growing maturity of business institutions. Recently, media exposure of labour standards in Asia prompted a cascade of initiatives by companies such as Nike in the US and Puma in Germany. Moreover, people have seen that companies reeling from media and C Ethics schemes have spread, yet no evidence suggests this is the result of a fall in standards ‘‘ Adding corporate ethics to the bottom line

Business and Society

Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

This article investigates corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an institution within UK multi-national corporations (MNCs). In the context of the literature on the institutionalization of CSR and on critical CSR, it presents two main findings. First, it contributes to the CSR mainstream literature by confirming that CSR has not only become institutionalized in society but that a form of this institution is also present within MNCs. Secondly, it contributes to the critical CSR literature by suggesting that unlike broader notions of CSR shared between multiple stakeholders, MNCs practise a form of CSR that undermines the broader stakeholder concept. By increasingly focusing on strategic forms of CSR activity, MNCs are moving away from a societal understanding of CSR that focuses on redressing the impacts of their operations through stakeholder concerns, back to any activity that supports traditional business imperatives. The implications of this shift are considered using institutional theory to evaluate macro-institutional pressures for CSR activity and the agency of powerful incumbents in the contested field of CSR.

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An Institution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Multi-National Corporations (MNCs): Form and Implications

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and government. CSR is often viewed as self-regulation, devoid of government. We attribute the scholarly neglect of the variety of CSR-government relations to the inadequate attention paid to the important differences in the way in which CSR has ‘travelled’ (or diffused), and has been mediated by the national governance systems, and the insufficient emphasis given to the role of the government (or government agency) in the CSR domain. We go on to identify a number of different types of CSR-government configurations, and by following empirically the CSR development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia in a comparative historical perspective, we derive a set of propositions on the changing dynamics of CSR-government configurations. In particular, we highlight the varied role that the governments can play in order to promote CSR in the context of the wider national governance systems.

Gond

Papers

The Government of Self-Regulation: On the Comparative Dynamics of Corporate Social Responsibility