An Inductive Typology of Corporate Social Responsibility

This article proposes a middle range theory of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a classification scheme of the current CSR debate in theory and practice. There are four features of CSR types-Ideology, Legitimacy, Language, Leadership-while not exhaustive, provide a descriptive framework within which existing CSR practice might be located. Extension in the list of feature descriptors may be envisaged both in terms of impact external to a firm (e.g., marketplace differentiation in terms of CSR), as well as internal characteristics (e.g., reward mechanisms), even levels of costs associated with each prototype. The challenge, however, might lie, not in a full description, but in generating enough features that would allow discrimination to emerge among the considered set of corporations. There is hence, an inherent link between our framework of CSR location (i.e., the Strategy/Value matrix) and the table of featural differences, which in tandem could serve the purpose of category assignment through identification of prototypical features.