Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 17, 2006

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting

Managing Corporate Social Responsibility in Action
Reconciling Rhetorical Harmony and Practical Dissonance

We note a discrepancy between a general and global CSR discourse that seems to be rather homogeneous in content, and an apparent heterogeneity of actual operationalizations of CSR at the firm level. Further, we suggest that the measurement of CSR plays a mediating role between the two. In this paper we first show that indeed there appears to be a rather homogeneous CSR discourse at the broadest level of analysis, and we offer an explanation for this observation. We then show how at the operational level there actually is much heterogeneity, not only across countries, and across and within industries, but also within firms and throughout time. Again, we offer an explanation for these observations. Finally, we discuss how emerging CSR reporting systems can serve as mediators between the contradicting trends at both levels.