The Global Expansion of Corporate Social Responsibility: Emergence, Diffusion, and Reception of Global Corporate Governance Frameworks.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the global expansion of corporate social responsibility (CSR)—the worldwide convergence of CSR around human rights, environmental, and labor issues, and the widespread adoption of CSR frameworks. Contrary to studies that view CSR as the product of firm-level factors, I argue that the global expansion of CSR stems from factors in a firm’s external environment. In a multi-stage process, I explain how attempts by actors to shape the moral regulation of the global economy, especially in periods with profound contradictions in the institutional regulation of economic activity, drive the emergence, diffusion, and reception of global CSR frameworks. First, I discuss the theories of Emile Durkheim, Karl Polanyi, and John W. Meyer to construct an analytic framework of the moral regulation of the economy that specifies significant events, channels, and factors of moral regulation that stem from institutional and economic domains at both global and domestic levels. Second, I examine institutional emergence and change in the intergovernmental CSR field from 1964 to the present. Utilizing historical documents from the United Nations, I show how external events and changes in internal field composition lead to the emergence of global CSR frameworks and change in institutional outcomes for the intergovernmental CSR field. Third, I compare institutional and economic factors that drive the diffusion of CSR frameworks across various corporations and countries in the world. In cross-national time-series analyses, I show how global pressures through nongovernmental and bilateral trade channels lead to CSR framework adoption. I also demonstrate how corporations in developed and developing countries respond to these environmental pressures with different levels of CSR commitment. Finally, I examine the subsequent domestic reception of CSR frameworks in a case study of the Republic of Singapore. Using fieldwork and interview data with corporate, government, and nongovernmental actors, I examine lateral decoupling among domestic receptor sites and how corporations in Singapore respond to CSR pressures with different recoupling strategies. Throughout the dissertation, I use the case of the global expansion of CSR to critique and refine new institutional and world society explanations of the emergence, diffusion, and reception of social institutions.