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When is there a sustainability case for CSR? Pathways to environmental and social performance improvements

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-10, 10:25 authored by Minna Halme, Jukka Rintamaki, Jette Steen Knudsen, Leena Lankoski, Mika Kuisma
Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements.

Funding

The data for this study was gathered in a research project funded by the European Union Framework Program 7, under Grant Agreement no. 244618.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Business & Society

Volume

59

Issue

6

Pages

1181 - 1227

Citation

HALME, M. ... et al, 2020. When is there a sustainability case for CSR? Pathways to environmental and social performance improvements. Business & Society, 59 (6), pp.1181-1227.

Publisher

SAGE Publications © The Authors

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2018-03-21

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Business & Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650318755648.

ISSN

0007-6503

eISSN

1552-4205

Language

  • en

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