Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis, and multidimensional scaling among others. Informed by neo-institutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions toward cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticisms, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles. Provided by publisher.

Machine generated contents note: 1. The social regulation of the economy in the global context Alwyn Lim and Kiyoteru Tsutsui; Part I. Legitimation and Contestation in Global Corporate Social Responsibility: 2. Legitimating the transnational corporation in a stateless world society John W. Meyer, Shawn M. Pope and Andrew Isaacson; 3. Corporate social responsibility and the evolving standards regime: regulatory and political dynamics Peter Utting; 4. Explaining the rise of national corporate social responsibility: the role of global frameworks, world culture and corporate interests Daniel Kinderman; Part II. Social Construction and Field Formation in Global Corporate Social Responsibility: 5. Corporations, conflict minerals and corporate social responsibility Virginia Haufler; 6. The institutionalization of supply chain corporate social responsibility: field formation in comparative context Jennifer Bair and Florence Palpacuer; 7. Sustainability discourse and capitalist variety: a comparative institutional analysis Klaus Weber and Sara B. Soderstrom; Part III. Corporations' Reaction to Global Corporate Social Responsibility Pressures: 8. Why firms participate in the global corporate social responsibility initiatives, 2000-10 Shawn M. Pope; 9. Why do companies join the United Nations Global Compact? The case of Japanese signatories Satoshi Miura and Kaoru Kurusu; 10. Global corporate resistance to public pressures: corporate stakeholder mobilization in the US, Norway, Germany and France Edward T. Walker; Part IV. The Impact of Global Corporate Social Responsibility Pressures on Corporate Social Responsibility Outcomes: 11. Is greenness in the eye of the beholder? Corporate social responsibility frameworks and the environmental performance of US firms Ion Bogdan Vasi; 12. The mobility of industries and the limits of corporate social responsibility: labor codes of conduct in Indonesian factories Tim Bartley and Doug Kincaid; 13. Good firms, good targets: the relationship between corporate social responsibility, reputation, and activist targeting Brayden G. King and Mary-Hunter McDonnell; 14. Conclusion. Corporate social responsibility as social regulation Aseem Prakash.