Managing Corporate Social Responsibility in Action by Frank de Bakker Frank den Hond

Author:Frank de Bakker, Frank den Hond [Frank de Bakker, Frank den Hond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409459866
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2012-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

A neo–institutional and Knowledge-creating Point of Departure

Transfer – or the import and export – of knowledge and values generates both theoretical and empirical questions. Powell and DiMaggio (1991b) describe different forms of institutional isomorphism, which denote how organizations and corporations become more and more similar with respect to organizational forms. How does this isomorphism come about? According to Powell and DiMaggio (1991b), the different forms of isomorphism relate to coercion, mimicry, or norm following, depending on which environmental forces are influencing the organization. Scott (1995) argues that various types of repositories, or carriers, are bringing ideas from one place to another. Regulatory, normative, and cognitive carriers provide different kinds of meaning to social behaviour as well as various kinds of compliance to act according to rules, norms, or cognitive arguments.

Knowledge, practices and values – in short, organizational recipes (Ness 2003)–may also be seen as symbols of modernity, legitimizing the organization’s activities versus local/national authorities and multinational/global treaties and trends (Røvik 1996, 1998). This perspective implies that some actors – usually those in a managerial position – are on the lookout for the latest and most trendy organizational recipe, not necessarily because the actual recipe will solve the problems in their organizations, but because they want to ensure that the organization’s (and the manager’s) image is up to date and legitimate. Applying modern management recipes hence shows off.

Recent studies show that organizations may make use of institutionalized standards that are in line with their already established practices or they may be decoupled from institutionalized demands and become superstandards (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Røvik 1998; Irgens 2003; Ness 2003). A superstandard may be conceived of as an organizational recipe that can be used as a norm for organizing or legitimating business practices at any time and anywhere in the world. In our view, the export or import of organizational recipes always involves individual actors. When corporations change their policies, products, or business ethics, this change will be difficult to understand if actors are not seen as both carriers and monitors of the multiple institutional logics that are ingrained in such processes. Processes describing the editing, sharing, and institutionalizing of standards, values, ideologies, competencies, and technologies in organizations inevitably then must rely on some assumptions about how learning processes unfold in individuals, in groups, and ultimately in and among organizations (Argyris and Schön 1978).

In line with Friedland and Alford (1991), we argue that actors can use and manipulate any recipe at their disposal. Even scientific theories can often be used in several ways. Prescriptive economic theories, such as transaction cost economics and agency theory, may be used to legitimize the maximization of huge management salaries, stock options, and bonuses as reward for successful management – the ingrained logic being that this will ensure that managers will focus on the maximization of profits for shareholders. The fact that (some) managers are apt to use this logic when downsizing or selling out companies – in order to maximize their own economic position – is underreported (Kaufman, Zacharias and Karson 1995).

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