Towards an Integrative Perspective on Decoupling : Are Multinational Companies Doing CSR to Disguise Corruption?

Surprisingly, organization and management literature has long tended to regard corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics & compliance (or: anti-corruption) separately, although actors such as the United Nations typically regard anti-corruption as a part of CSR. As a result, CSR and anti-corruption scholars currently derive contradictory expectations, e.g., as regards the role of formal processes and firm size in managing organizational responsibility: Previous CSR lit-erature suggests that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) focus on ‘walking' CSR (= implementing CSR in daily business), whereas large firms tend to restrict on ‘talking' CSR (= establish formal processes as public relations tools). Corruption scholars challenge this conclu-sion and highlight the need to formally implement and communicate anti-corruption processes at both small and large firms. We aim to help solve this controversy by empirically investigating the relation between CSR and corruption at a set of 491 small and large internationally operating Swiss firms. Our findings reveal that firms that only ‘walk' – but do not ‘talk' – CSR are more likely to be involved in corrupt activities than firms who do neither ‘walk' nor ‘talk' CSR. We hence suggest the need to develop an integrative perspective on decoupling and on CSR