TY - JOUR

T1 - A bait-and-switch model of corporate social responsibility

AU - Haack, Patrick

AU - Martignoni, Dirk

AU - Schoeneborn, Dennis

N1 - Funding Information: We thank Associate Editor Heli Wang and three anonymous reviewers for their guidance and developmental feedback during the review process. We furthermore received, based on previous drafts, valuable comments and suggestions by Blagoy Blagoev, Itziar Castello, Lars Thøger Christensen, Andy Crane, Peer Fiss, Mikkel Flyverbom, Mike Lounsbury, Jim March, Mette Morsing, Andreas Rasche, Anna Sto€ber, and Klaus Weber. We are also grateful for the helpful feedback from participants at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2015, as well as in research seminars at the Universities of Lausanne, Stanford, and Zurich. This research has been supported through the Governing Responsible Business (GRB) cluster at Copenhagen Business School. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Academy of Management. All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/7

Y1 - 2021/7

N2 - The notion that transparency forces organizations to eschew decoupling and embrace substantive adoption represents an important assumption in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. Conversely, research on learning and social control has considered opacity-understood as a lack of transparency-to be conducive to substantive CSR adoption. These opposing viewpoints highlight a fundamental tension: Is transparency good or bad for substantive adoption? This paper resolves this tension by asking an alternative question: When is transparency good or bad, and why? We advance a dynamic perspective that conceives transparency and opacity as transitory phenomena, and we specify the boundary conditions for which either enduring or transitory forms of transparency and opacity further the substantive adoption of CSR. Our analyses reveal that, for circumstances under which the motivation of ceremonial adoption is hypocritical (rather than opportunistic) and where both substantive adoption and practice abandonment are difficult, the former can be maximized by first allowing organizations to adopt a CSR practice ceremonially under opacity ("bait"), and then prompting ceremonial adopters to become substantive adopters through a shift to transparency ("switch"). Specifying this bait-and-switch mechanism and its underlying contingencies reveals a hitherto unexplored, and potentially effective, pathway toward the institutionalization of CSR.

AB - The notion that transparency forces organizations to eschew decoupling and embrace substantive adoption represents an important assumption in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. Conversely, research on learning and social control has considered opacity-understood as a lack of transparency-to be conducive to substantive CSR adoption. These opposing viewpoints highlight a fundamental tension: Is transparency good or bad for substantive adoption? This paper resolves this tension by asking an alternative question: When is transparency good or bad, and why? We advance a dynamic perspective that conceives transparency and opacity as transitory phenomena, and we specify the boundary conditions for which either enduring or transitory forms of transparency and opacity further the substantive adoption of CSR. Our analyses reveal that, for circumstances under which the motivation of ceremonial adoption is hypocritical (rather than opportunistic) and where both substantive adoption and practice abandonment are difficult, the former can be maximized by first allowing organizations to adopt a CSR practice ceremonially under opacity ("bait"), and then prompting ceremonial adopters to become substantive adopters through a shift to transparency ("switch"). Specifying this bait-and-switch mechanism and its underlying contingencies reveals a hitherto unexplored, and potentially effective, pathway toward the institutionalization of CSR.

KW - Management studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092586190&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.5465/amr.2018.0139

DO - 10.5465/amr.2018.0139

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 46

SP - 440

EP - 464

JO - Academy of Management Review

JF - Academy of Management Review

SN - 0363-7425

IS - 3

ER -