Neither National Boundaries Nor Transnational Social Spaces : Accounting for Variations of CSR Practices in Varieties of Capitalism

The paper empirically re-examines the role of national institutions and trans-national social spaces in accounting for variations in CSR practices. Based on a longitudinal study of corporate social reporting in UK and Germany, the paper concludes that corporate stakeholder salience patterns are outcomes of interaction effects between national institutional boundaries and trans-national social spaces. It pushes the institutionalist frontier of research to corporate stakeholder salience – which is a precursor and intrinsic to both corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility. In addition, it opens a new vista of looking at corporate social reports – i.e. not only as artefacts of accountability, but also carriers and reflectors of national and trans-national characteristics and influences. The paper finally highlights implications of the findings for CSR and comparative capitalism research, respectively