Abstract
Prior research on the internationalization of firms from emerging countries has fruitfully invoked institutional theory to emphasize the legitimacy benefits that firms that obtain from showing isomorphism with international norms such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Without denying the intuitive appeal for these firms to communicate acceptance of CSR, we suggest that firms face a legitimacy trade-off, where the hoped-for legitimacy benefits of isomorphism must be weighed against other home-country institutional considerations. We advance and test this notion that firms will navigate this institutional complexity by engaging in anisomorphism, i.e., espousing general acceptance with international values but with selective ‘translation’ based on home country differences. We test our predictions by analysing firms' communication of CSR, using a unique dataset comprised of 245 firms observed over the period from 2000 to 2018. Consistent with our predictions, we find that firms from countries more reliant on natural resource extraction (e.g., mining and fossil fuel industries) de-emphasize the environmental component of CSR, and firms from more autocratic countries de-emphasize the human rights component of CSR. Additionally, and consistent with our presumption of firms' weighing the international versus home-country legitimacy trade-off, we find that these main effects are sensitive to changes in firms' levels of internationalization.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 413-444 |
Number of pages | 32 |
Journal | Journal of Management Studies |
Volume | 61 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2024 |
Funding
The authors would like to thank the editor and the three anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and recommendations. Thanks go also to Daniele Dalli, Alessandro Gandolfo and Andrea Vezzulli for their support at the beginning of this project and to Michael Smets for sharing ideas and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. The paper also benefited from comments received at the 2017 CSR Communication Conference in Vienna and the 2018 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Chicago. Financial support by University of Pisa (PRA PROJECT 2020‐52 ) is gratefully acknowledged. Shaky capitalism: How business and finance respond to global threats
Keywords
- anisomorphism
- corporate social responsibility (CSR)
- emerging countries
- institutional complexity
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business and International Management
- Strategy and Management
- Management of Technology and Innovation