Legitimacy as a Key Driver and Determinant of CSR in Developing Countries

Abstract

This paper aims to specify the conceptual limits of CSR in a developing country context. Taking organisational legitimacy theory as a departure-point, it is argued that two key shortcomings regarding the contribution of CSR towards development can be identified: First, a multinational company operating in a remote country mainly seeks to gain legitimacy from its primary stakeholders which are typically based in its home market (e.g. customers, media), leading to a bias towards short-term projects with a high visibility rather than longer-term capacity-building initiatives. Second, differing perceptions of legitimacy in the home and the host country can lead to a misjudgement of which kind of initiative would be deemed appropriate in the host country and, subsequently, a misallocation of resources occurs. Implications are presented regarding (a) the strategic alignment of a corporation’s engagement in CSR as well as (b) the conceptual limits of CSR in contributing towards (ecological) sustainability.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 68 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.