What We Know and Don’t Know About Corporate Social Responsibility

TLDR

The authors aim to develop a multilevel, multidisciplinary framework and research agenda that integrates CSR literature across institutional, organizational, and individual levels and elucidates underlying mechanisms and microfoundations. They review 588 journal articles and 102 books to construct a framework that identifies reactive and proactive CSR predictors, internal and external outcomes, mediating relationship‑ and value‑based variables, and contingency moderators, and they propose specific research design, measurement, and data‑analytic strategies. The review uncovers gaps in theoretical orientation adoption, limited understanding of CSR–outcome mechanisms, scarcity of micro‑level studies, and a lack of methodological tools to address these issues.

Abstract

The authors review the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature based on 588 journal articles and 102 books and book chapters. They offer a multilevel and multidisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes and integrates the literature at the institutional, organizational, and individual levels of analysis. The framework includes reactive and proactive predictors of CSR actions and policies and the outcomes of such actions and policies, which they classify as primarily affecting internal (i.e., internal outcomes) or external (i.e., external outcomes) stakeholders. The framework includes variables that explain underlying mechanisms (i.e., relationship- and value-based mediator variables) of CSR–outcomes relationships and contingency effects (i.e., people-, place-, price-, and profile-based moderator variables) that explain conditions under which the relationship between CSR and its outcomes change. The authors’ review reveals important knowledge gaps related to the adoption of different theoretical orientations by researchers studying CSR at different levels of analysis, the need to understand underlying mechanisms linking CSR with outcomes, the need for research at micro levels of analysis (i.e., individuals and teams), and the need for methodological approaches that will help address these substantive knowledge gaps. Accordingly, they offer a detailed research agenda for the future, based on a multilevel perspective that aims to integrate diverse theoretical frameworks as well as develop an understanding of underlying mechanisms and microfoundations of CSR (i.e., foundations based on individual action and interactions). The authors also provide specific suggestions regarding research design, measurement, and data-analytic approaches that will be instrumental in carrying out their proposed research agenda.