GRENZÜBERSCHREITENDES CSR-MANAGEMENT IN MULTINATIONALEN UNTERNEHMEN

Through their cross-border activities, multinational corporations (MNCs) are particularly exposed to potentially incompatible demands and expectations of varying institutional and cultural origin. This is especially true for their international corporate social responsibility (CSR) management. The present dissertation therefore investigates how MNCs cope with institutional complexity in their cross-border CSR management – i.e. how they organize it along identities, practices and structures and how this shapes their responses to specific institutional demands and expectations? The multiple comparative case studies executed to this end yield three major insights: (1) First, how MNCs cope with institutional complexity varies along different, simultaneously realized types of cross-border CSR management. (2) Moreover, MNCs’ CSR identity functions as an institutional filter that, at the same time, organizes these types. However, (3) as their CSR identities are increasingly inspired by transnational institutions, this mechanism successively results in practically and structurally standardizing MNCs’ cross-border CSR management; as a consequence, in the companies under investigation, different demands e.g. from national origin are gradually sidelined. Thus, the present research not only challenges the assumption of homogenous CSR management held up by previous internationalization studies. Its insights into how MNCs selectively cope with institutional complexity also emphasize the key role played by CSR identities and point to the growing influence of transnational institutions. Thereby, this dissertation decisively contributes to existing work both in the field of international and institutional CSR research.