Legitimation strategies of Russian companies: a bricolage of social responsibility

ABSTRACT

Russian companies, with their long-established tradition of social responsibility, still operate social and infrastructure projects at the regional and local levels. Adopting the framework of organisational “bricolage”, this article explores how managers combine various ideas and understandings about social responsibility, creating narratives addressed to multiple audiences, including the market, state, employees and local community. The analysis builds on 116 semi-structured interviews with company representatives and stakeholders, conducted in Russia in 2018. The empirical findings show that managers construct a bricolage of social responsibility that prioritises business interests and highlights loyalty towards the authorities; Soviet-era remnants are of minor importance.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate social responsibility
• bricolage
• legitimacy
• business
• market economy
• Russia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Viktoria Antonova and the two reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Deephouse and Suchman (2008, 54) argue that legitimacy “ … is socially constructed and emerges out of the subject's relation to other rules, laws, norms, values, and cognitive frameworks in a larger social system”.

2 Projects at the local and regional level include the construction and upgrading of infrastructure (roads, railway, housing, broadband internet), health care facilities (clinics), education facilities (kindergartens, schools, etc.), social programs (recreation programs) and cultural projects. Activities are structures along codified CSR, such as ISO 14001, 26000, UN Global Compact or Global Reporting.

3 See also Platforma, https://pltf.ru/2021/03/10/biznes-i-territorii-novyj-etap-otnoshenij/, accessed March 14, 2021.

4 For example, Law 40-FZ 2010 grants tax exemptions for companies financing charitable NGOs.

5 https://www.rbc.ru/rbc500/, accessed 8 October 2019.

6 Retailers focus mainly on domestic markets. They also adopt CSR standards, although this is no precondition for access to international markets. With social activities, they aim at binding consumers to their own company and gaining competitive advantage (see below).

7 NGOs and experts corroborated that regional authorities expect companies to compensate budgetary constraints, and that business would be obliged to the state as a whole. It was stressed that most authorities regard it as a companies’ task to advance the development of the region of residence, and that this expectation is somehow rooted in the Soviet past (032-E-V, 112-NGO-K, 025-E-M). See also Zueva and Fairbrass (2019).

8 This includes investments in roads, housing, broadband internet, health care facilities, kindergartens, schools, recreation programmes (putyovka), and cultural provisions such as festivals or theatre, as well as internal training and corporate universities.

9 Subbotnik: voluntary (but de facto more or less obligatory) unpaid work on weekends.

10 Demands and expectations of the local population were frequently mentioned as a “driver of philanthropy” (001-E-oR) by the companies’ representatives, NGOs and experts.

11 “Rodnye goroda, http://rodnyegoroda.ru/, and “Territoriia Rusala”, https://fcsp.ru/program/rusal_territory/grant/, accessed June 20, 2021.

12 This was corroborated by NGOs and experts who highlighted that incumbents expect companies to finance those projects that help increase the legitimacy of incumbents (052-NGO-V, 073-NGO-T).

13 See Putin, V. V. (2004). Introductory speech at the XIV RUIE Summit, the Kremlin.

 

Additional information

Funding

The article forms part of the research project “Variations of Governance in Hybrid Regimes”, funded by the German Research Foundation, project number 388732203.

Notes on contributors

Sabine Kropp

Sabine Kropp is professor at Freie Universität Berlin. She wrote her dissertation on decentralisation processes in the Russian multilevel system during transition. She recently led a Metro Foundation-funded project as well as a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) that examined patterns of governance in Russian regions and different policy areas; special attention was paid to the role of NGOs and companies in governance networks. Her main areas of work include the topics of comparative federalism and parliamentary research as well as administrative-political issues, which refers to both western democracies and post-socialist systems.

Stanislav Klimovich

Stanislav Klimovich is PhD student at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2016, he received his master’s degree in political science at the Higher School of Economics, HSE Moscow. His academic interests are in the field of governance in Russia, federalism and decentralisation in Russia and Germany, as well as multilevel coalition formation in parliamentary democracies.

Ulla Pape

Ulla Pape is post-doc researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). Prior to that, she was a lecturer in European Studies at the University of Bremen, senior researcher at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and post-doc researcher in the Third Sector Impact Project at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her main research interests include social policy, health and civil society development in Russia and Europe. Her publications include a book, The Politics of HIV/AIDS in Russia, and several articles in international journals such as Voluntas. International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, the International Journal for Sociology and Social Policy, and Europe-Asia Studies.