Legitimacy Or Instrumental: What Drives CSR Behavior In The Emerging Economy Of China

Concerns over corporate social responsibility (CSR) have grown significantly during the last two decades. Not only has the issue become a hot topic in the business press and among business and political leaders, but a body of academic literature has also emerged around the CSR issue. Most of the theoretically oriented research on the subject focused on exploring the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance, while few did the other way around. Understanding why firms commit to socially responsible behavior has been a key issue that is not yet sufficiently addressed in the CSR field. As a result, this study aims to fill the void and investigate the conditions under which firms are more likely to engage in CSR.Combining the neoinstitutional and resource-based theoretical perspectives, we propose an integrative framework for explaining the antecedents of CSR. The empirical study is based on an original survey study of executive managers from 173 Chinese firms. Findings from the study provide the evidence that CSR is not only a competitive process but also a complex institution-based process, which is highly embedded in the firm's internal and external environment. Among the resource-related determinants, top management commitment to ethics plays an essential role in propelling firms to undertake various types of CSR. Among the institutional determinants, social normative pressure and regulatory stringency have strong positive influences on firms' level of CSR participation. We further compare the relative predictive power of competitive mechanism and institutional isomorphic mechanism, and find greater contribution of the former, supporting an economic or strategic perspective on organizational social involvements in China. What's more, peer pressure does not necessarily lead to socially responsible behavior, as its impacts are contingent on the resource characteristics of firms.These results have important implications for CSR research as well as for broader organizational and strategy studies. For research on the business and society, this study indicates that both competitive and institutional mechanisms influence corporate social responsibility. In particular, TMT commitment to ethics among the resource factors, and normative isomorphism among the institutional mechanisms, are conducive to responsible practices by businesses in the emerging countries. While prior studies have adopted either explanation, our research joins Oliver (1997) and Bansal (2005)'s call for integrating complementary perspectives in various organizational studies, and demonstrates the usefulness of combining resource-based theory and institutional theoretical perspectives in explaining CSR phenomena.Our empirical results suggest that the dichotomy between task and institutional environments, though useful, may deflect attention from multiple organizational motives in establishing and maintaining relationship with the environment, such as social responsibility activities. More research is expected in organizational contexts where competitive and institutional pressures coexist in shaping organizational behavior and success, where the relative influences of and potential conflicts between these pressures can be fully explored.The structure of this study is as follows. Chapter One introduces the research context from which the research question is proposed, expounds the content and methods of this study, and presents the research process and overall structure. Chapter Two makes a literature review of CSR studies, institutional theory and resource-based theory, laying the theoretical foundations of this study. Chapter Three introduces theoretical model development and hypothesis proposition. Chapter Four presents the research design and methodology, which includes questionnaire development, exploratory study and preliminary analysis. Chapter Five presents and discusses the empirical findings and analyses. Lastly, Chapter Six summarizes the conclusions and theoretical contributions derived from this study, points out its limitation as well as suggests future research directions.