How Firms Communicate Their Social Roles through Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship, and Corporate Sustainability: An Institutional Comparative Analysis of Firms’ Social Reports

ABSTRACT

Drawing on institutional theory and the varieties of capitalism framework, this content analysis investigated how firms communicate their social roles through the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate citizenship (CC), and corporate sustainability (CS) in their social reports. First, the salience of the six social themes of labor, business ethics, community, environment, business behavior, and economic responsibility were investigated, followed by cross-national differences in liberal market economies (LMEs: US, UK), coordinated market economies (CMEs: Germany, Japan), and state-led market economies (SLMEs: France and South Korea). Contrary to previous conceptualizations, the economic responsibility theme was more salient when CS was adopted in the titles of firms’ social reports than CSR, and the three non-economic social themes of business ethics, community, and business behavior were not less salient when CSR was adopted. Comparatively, CSR was less adopted in SLMEs, CC was more adopted in LMEs, and CS was less adopted in LMEs. Theoretically, firms’ social roles were distinctly communicated and institutionalized through CSR, CC, and CS, with clear comparative differences. Practically, firms can more strategically signal compliance to institutional conditions about firms’ social roles in different market economies, and influence how firms’ social roles are communicatively institutionalized, by considering these concepts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For example, Valor (2005) positioned corporate social performance and stakeholder theory under the analysis of CSR, stating that corporate social performance represents “an attempt to offer a managerial framework to deal with the CSR, and simultaneously, an attempt to measure CSR” and the stakeholder theory reinforces the concept of CSR (p. 193). The theme of business ethics is also conceptualized broadly as a study of “business situations, activities, and decisions where issues of right and wrong are addressed” (Crane & Matten, 2016, p. 5).

² It is noted that the categorization adopted in this study has limitations. For example, Kang and Moon (2012) cautioned that France and South Korea since the 1980s have undergone radical changes, thereby making them less suitable as archetypes of SLMEs in the present. However, subsequent empirical research has continued to categorize and find both France and South Korea as SLMEs (e.g., Jamali & Karam, 2018), France as an SLME (Fransen, 2013; Gallego-Álvarez et al., 2017; Young & Marais, 2012), and South Korea as an SLME (Witt, 2014). In terms of South Korea, Witt (2014) provided that “Korea falls somewhere between the opposite poles of coordinated and liberal market economies (CMEs and LMEs). Developments over the past fifteen years seem to have pushed the system somewhat closer toward the Anglo-Saxon LME model, though as we have seen actual practice is far from what one would expect of an LME. Indeed, the closest relatives of the Korean business system in the West might well be the Southern European ‘mixed’ or ‘state-led’ economies” (p. 232). In a similar vein, research showed the continuing strong influence of the state to the market economy in South Korea, positioning it outside the dichotomy of LMEs and CMEs (Kim et al., 2013). Echoing these studies, as well as considering the significance of the historical root of the national market economy in explaining cross-national variations in CSR (Brammer et al., 2012; Kang & Moon, 2012; Matten & Moon, 2008), this study posited that the categorization of LMEs, CMEs, and SLMEs as provided by Kang and Moon (2012) is still useful for cross-national exploration of firms’ social roles in this study.

³ Is it noted that the research reported here forms part of a larger project in which the dataset used in this study was collected together with other variables through the same data-gathering method and procedure, and that other aspects of the project have been presented elsewhere.