Unpacking the Institutional Complexity in Adoption of CSR Practices in Multinational Enterprises

2015/01/28 by Valentina Marano, Tatiana Kostova · 406 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · #Business #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Corporate governance #Corporate social responsibility #Economic system #Economics #Embeddedness #Foreign direct investment #Industrial organization #Innovation and Knowledge Management #Institutional theory #International Business and FDI #Multinational corporation #Organizational field #Political science #Portfolio #Public relations #Salience (neuroscience) #Salient #Sociology #Subsidiary #Unpacking

paper · doi:10.1111/joms.12124

published in Journal of Management Studies 53(1), 28-54 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2015/01/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25

Abstract

ABSTRACT Multinational enterprises (MNEs) operate in complex transnational organizational fields with multiple, diverse, and possibly conflicting institutional forces. This paper examines how such complex environments affect a firm's adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. To capture the effect of transnational fields, we consider the institutional influences of all country environments to which the firm is linked through its portfolio of operations and propose that these effects will be weighted depending on their relative salience. We identify a set of factors that make certain pressures more salient than others, including firm's economic dependence on a particular country, heterogeneity of institutional forces within the firm's transnational field, exposure to leading countries with more stringent CSR templates, and intensity and commitment to particular economic linkages (i.e., foreign direct investment versus international trade). Our hypotheses are tested and supported in a study of 710 US MNEs from 2007 to 2011 with global ties to over 100 countries.

Citations

• The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect
• Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
• Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R & D
• Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434
• Index Construction with Formative Indicators: An Alternative to Scale Development
• The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields
• A RESOURCE-BASED PERSPECTIVE ON CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE AND PROFITABILITY.

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• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Implementation: A Review and a Research Agenda Towards an Integrative Framework. [europepmc]
• The Interplay of Conflicting and Complementing Institutional Logics in Sustainability Practices. [europepmc]
• SDGs in corporate responsibility reporting: a longitudinal investigation of institutional determinants and financial performance [europepmc]

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