Management responsable et PME : une relecture du concept de « responsabilité sociétale de l'entreprise"

Despite the discourses on SMEs benefits for implementing CSR strategy, despite the growing number of CSR related tools addressing this issue, SMEs are poorly involved in CSR strategic approach. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the drivers and the blocks of CSR integration into SMEs strategy in order to improve the conceptual framework of CSR. In addition to the usual blocks as the lack of financial and times resources, as the economic vulnerability, we use theorical approach and interviews to identify new checks on CSR integration into SMEs strategy: the lack of social networks that could facilitate entrepreneur's culture changes, the weakness of social responsibility as an institutionalized value within the organizational field and therefore the lack of mimetic and normative constraints that modify their behavior. The drivers usually identified: customers pressures, coercitive constraints and the emergent ones (Banks, invitation to tender from administration) lead to apparent compliance, at best to a single loop learning. An effective integration of social and environmental objectives into SMEs strategy depends on entrepreneur cognition change (second learning loop). It relies on the institutionalized values that spread in the network in which the manager is embedded (especially regional clusters).