Business Legitimacy and the Margins of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Russian Context

Abstract

Large and medium-size companies have failed to acquire legitimacy and respectability among the vast strata of Russian society. The resulting crisis of confidence may have serious consequences, including increasing intervention by the state. Our study, which is based on a survey of 129 firms in Russia, seeks, first, to establish whether Russian managers' attitudes toward and understanding of corporate social responsibility were similar to those of their Western counterparts and, second, to find out whether the conditions of low generalized public trust in Russian corporations would stimulate Russian firms to develop corporate social responsibility as a means of increasing their legitimacy with their stakeholders, as suggested in the literature. Our survey provides evidence of a discrepancy between attitudes predicted by theory and those revealed by managers. This leads us to consider a range of economic, social, and political factors in the search for an explanation for the discrepancy.