Csr In Colombia

Journal of Business Ethics (2010) 91:229–242 DOI 10.1007/s10551-010-0616-9

Ó Springer 2010

Corporate Social Responsibility in Colombia: Making Sense of Social Strategies

Adam Lindgreen ´ ´ Jose-Rodrigo Cordoba Francois Maon ¸ ´ ´ Jose Marıa Mendoza

ABSTRACT. As corporate social responsibility (CSR) grows increasingly well known and accepted worldwide, organizations attempt to makesense of their social strategies bridge the gap between their current situation and what their stakeholders expect of them. If social strategies represent a potential stepping stone to more sophisticated forms of CSR, then research must investigate the strategies that organizations have adopted. After defining a framework for classifying and analyzing organizations’ social strategies, this articleconsiders empirical evidence from 10 case studies in Colombia to reveal how organizations might build on their social involvement to engage in more sophisticated CSR practices. The framework also suggests some different trajectories that organizations might follow. KEY WORDS: corporate social responsibility (CSR), social strategies, Colombia

As organizations continue to assume greater levels ofsocial responsibility, especially in the past decade, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gone beyond being just a buzzword (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2004; Lichtenstein et al., 2004; McWilliams et al., 2006). The basic premise in CSR literature, still largely dominated by U.S. and European perspectives, is that organizations cannot be concerned solely with making a profit but also must engage in‘‘actions that appear to further some social good, beyond the interests of the firm and that which is required by law’’ (McWilliams et al., 2006, p. 1). In practice, organizations attempt to develop social strategies that will enable them to bridge the gap between their current situation and the expectations of stakeholders (Crane et al., 2008a, b; Dunphy et al., 2003; Kotler and Lee, 2005). Yet itremains difficult to provide a single defi´ nition of CSR (Carroll, 1999; Garriga and Mele,

2004; Lee, 2008), because the term appears in a variety of forms (Andriof and McIntosh, 2001; Pinkston and Carroll, 1996; Snider et al., 2003). This situation largely reflects the basic idea that CSR evolves over time; some (intermediary) CSR elements are not practices in their own right but insteadconstitute transition states (Egri and Ralston, 2008; Hawkins, 2006; Lindgreen et al., 2007). Current research also cannot determine conclusively, for example, whether CSR develops progressively along a continuum or moves in multiple directions. In order to extend this discussion, we identify the evolution of CSR practices with respect to the development of formalized structures inside an organization. Wealso study the path-dependent nature of CSR practices, such that prior divergences lead to different CSR practices in the future, and thereby examine the route that organizations follow in implementing their CSR practices. Furthermore, the heavy influence of a U.S. perspective (Crane et al., 2008b) and increasingly a European one (Smith and Lenssen, 2009) has defined conceptualizations of CSR(Crane and Matten, 2007; Fox, 2004). Yet these conceptualizations and related recommendations for how organizations can act responsibly may be of limited utility in other cultural contexts (Lindgreen et al., 2010). In particular, cultural aspects often determine what is required and expected of organizations with regard to economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary concerns (e.g., Burton et al., 2000;Chapple and Moon, 2005; Kusku and Zarkada-Fraser, 2004; Matten and Moon, 2008; Visser, 2006). Our study therefore investigates how Colombian organizations historically have engaged in CSR, to

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