Toward the stakeholder company : essays on the role of organizational culture, interaction, and change in the pursuit of corporate social responsibility

(eng) Companies are ever more expected to acknowledge their ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR). Beyond their profit objectives, they are not only increasingly exhorted to address social and environmental issues associated with their business activities but also asked to play a constructive role in fighting against problems such as human misery and global ecological deterioration. Despite their rising importance in the conduct of business, the dynamic and necessarily multipartite processes underlying the integration of CSR in corporate strategies and operations – or CSR development processes – are still under-explored. In this context, the central objective of this dissertation is to contribute to a better comprehension of these processes. For this purpose, we introduce a threefold perspective on CSR development. We first adopt a company-focused approach to explain the interconnections between CSR development and cultural and organizational adaptations of companies. Then we focus on the stakeholder side of CSR development to analyze the nature of stakeholders’ motivation to influence CSR development at companies and the strategies they use to do so. Finally, we bring together company- and stakeholder-focused perspectives to propose an integrative view of the CSR development phenomenon and conceptualize it as an ongoing, socially co-constructed process. Overall, the five essays composing this dissertation offer prescriptive and descriptive models aimed at advancing the understanding and development of socially responsible business practices.