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Corporate Social Responsibility Activities: Appropriability And Impact On Social Performance, Sylvia Maxfield, Jegoo Lee

Academic Conference on Good Business

To explore strategic aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this paper examines the impact of CSR activities on corporate social performance (CSP). Drawing from and synthezing two literatures, the well-known instrumental/strategic stakeholder theory and research on CSR strategic value criteria (Burke and Logsden, 1996), we conceptualize appropriability as a variable intermediating between a firm’s CSR activities and its CSP. We suggest that two considerations shape appropriability in the context of corporate social performance: 1) the extent to which social actions go beyond legal requirements and dominant social norms (voluntarism and proactivity) and, 2) the coherence of stakeholder groups’ interest aggregation …