Abstract
Refugee concerns may be perceived as controversial or outside the business domain, yet some corporations publicly engage these issues in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This article relies on institutional and constitutive approaches to CSR to explore why organizations might declare their engagement in refugee issues, and utilizes decoupling to explore the relationship between reported CSR policy and CSR activity. We utilize a mixed-method, content analysis approach to draw on Fortune Global 500 CSR reports between 2012 and 2019, a period in which refugee activity increased around the world. Our research suggests that few corporations offer refugee programming and fewer still feature programs that are “coupled” with either CSR policies or impacts. We introduce a typology that depicts these corporations as reactionary, recurring, relevant, or revelatory, and offer constitutive implications for CSR programming in response to other emerging social issues.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 185-212 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Business and Society |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2022.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was supported by funding from DePaul University, Northwestern University, and University of Kentucky.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Northwestern Polytechnical University | |
| University of Kentucky | |
| DePaul University |
Keywords
- constitutive communication
- corporate social responsibility (CSR)
- decoupling
- emerging social issue
- refugees
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous)
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
