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Open AccessJournal Article

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

TLDR
In this article, the authors explore the relationship between CSR and government and highlight the varied role that the governments can play in order to promote CSR in the context of the wider national governance systems.
Abstract
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.

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

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Journal ArticleDOI

Contesting the value of "creating shared value"

TL;DR: In this article, a critique of Porter and Kramer's concept of creating shared value is presented, 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.
Book

Business and Society

TL;DR: Corporate ethics have become a hot topic in the last few decades as mentioned in this paper, and the number of companies adopting a code of ethics has reached 80 per cent of the 500 largest corporations in the US.
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An Institution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Multi-National Corporations (MNCs): Form and Implications

TL;DR: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an institution within UK multi-national corporations (MNCs) has been investigated in this article, where the authors argue that 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.
References
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Book ChapterDOI

The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Journal ArticleDOI

Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness

TL;DR: In this article, the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society, is examined, and it is argued that reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong.
Book ChapterDOI

The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits

TL;DR: When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life as mentioned in this paper.
Book

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

TL;DR: In this paper, the key to the institutional system of the 19 century lay in the laws governing market economy, which was the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market, and it was this innovation which gave rise to a specific civilization.
Journal Article

Strategy and society: the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.

TL;DR: A fundamentally new way is proposed to look at the relationship between business and society that does not treat corporate growth and social welfare as a zero-sum game and introduces a framework that individual companies can use to identify the social consequences of their actions.