The dual face of corporate social responsibility in social businesses: a closer look at the Colombian reality/Las dos caras de la responsabilidad social empresarial en empresas sociales: una mirada mas cercana a la realidad colombiana/As duas faces da responsabilidade social empresarial nas empresas sociais: um olhar mais atento a realidade colombiana.
| Autor | Contreras-Pacheco, Orlando E. |
| Cargo | Research article |
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Introduction.
Since its origin, the overall concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has fluctuated between two extremes. One is the instrumentalist approach that reduces organizations' responsibility to the procurement of the greatest possible profit for their owners (e.g., Friedman, 1970; Jensen, 2002; Sundaram & Inkpen, 2004). The other is the normative approach that extends organizations' responsibility to those actions and decisions that ought to be performed, just because it is 'the right thing to do' and because they create a beneficial impact on society (e.g., Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Freeman, 1984; Godfrey, 2005). The above, beyond a merely semantic debate, represents the origin of a strong paradox that underpins a way for understanding management from both theoretical and practical angles (Cornelius, Todres, Janjuha-Jivraj, Woods, & Wallace, 2008).
In this regard, the present work examines how that paradox behaves in organizations initially conceived to create both a financial and societal impact at the same time. In this way, and taking advantage of their sense of belonging, the present work attempts to understand how highly identified members of a social business (SB) tend to label the concept of CSR, as they appreciate it according to their working experience. In order to accomplish the latter, this study is framed by the normative/instrumental dispute regarding the CSR framework and
uses the organizational identification (OID) concept as a means to engage research subjects and collect valuable information.
To process the data, this work relies on artificial intelligence (AI) tools by generating a text mining analysis using a bisectional K-means (B-kmeans) method programmed in R (Yu, Jannasch-Pennell & Digangi, 2011). Data comes from 34 structured interviews conducted with an equal number of highly identified employees from a midsized micro-finance institution in Colombia. Results reveal homogeneity in the answers collected, and simultaneously suggest that this type of employee usually trusts the implementation of the social purpose of their particular SB. Furthermore, the study identifies two distinct clusters of employees according to their conceptions of CSR: a small cluster with a normative orientation and a more numerous one with an instrumental emphasis. The findings suggest that, although both notions of CSR are allowed to coexist in an SB indicating complementarity, its employees can also assume (ergo undertake) their primary purpose as purely business-driven (instrumental CSR), instead of societally driven (normative CSR).
Taking into consideration that more work acknowledging the salience of CSR in SBs is still needed (Littlewood & Holt, 2018; Spence, 2016), the contribution of this work is threefold. First, it aims to enhance the CSR body of knowledge, insofar as it can provide evidence to demonstrate that an unbalanced coexistence between instrumental and normative visions of the CSR can be legitimate, even among highly identified employees belonging to purpose-driven companies. In that order of ideas, this work claims that considering the nature of the business examined, instead of a probable defeat of the moral concept of the CSR, the discovered prevalence of the instrumental notion has the potential to represent a situation in which both views emphasize each other's qualities. Second, from a practical point of view, the present work contributes to the organizational behavior domain to help disentangle how different conceptions of CSR can be visualized as correlated elements of positive individual attitudes and behaviors in SBs. Finally, this work attempts to introduce a novel methodological approach for studies in the fields of organizational theory and social enterprises.
The paper has four sections. The first section contains a brief theoretical background. The second presents, in a didactic fashion, the methodological approach utilized. The third section introduces the results obtained. Lastly, the fourth section contains, by way of conclusions, a final discussion of those results, highlighting implications, contributions, limitations, and proposed future research paths.
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Theoretical background.
The present section is divided into three sub-sections. First, it examines the current conception of CSR and its relationship with OID. Second, it introduces the normative/instrumentalist tension in visualizing CSR. Finally, it defines SBs in light of the notion of CSR.
2.1. Corporate social responsibility and its link with organizational identification.
From an organizational perspective, CSR has been lately associated with feelings, expressions, and actions performed by an entity (namely an organization) and for which that entity is held responsible (Jones & Rupp, 2017). However, its general conception has remained somewhat intangible and focused on something beyond just a reactiveness perception. CSR is indeed a multi-level, multi-faceted and dynamic construct, which contemplates the actions and decisions of all actors at several levels of analysis (i.e., institutional, organizational, and individual) (Aguilera, Rupp, Williams, & Ganapathi, 2007; Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). Consequently, for the sake of the present study, CSR will be defined as "context-specific organizational actions and policies that take into account stakeholders' expectations and the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental performance" (Aguinis, 2011, p. 855).
CSR's theoretical domain has been broad and useful in the relevant literature, specifically through its different applications in the field of industrial and organizational psychology (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). In this matter, one of the most fruitful research fields encompasses the perceptions of employees toward the different expressions of the concept of CSR in search of favorable organizational attitudes (Glavas, 2016). Particularly, CSR's role has mainly been pinpointed as an antecedent of certain attitudes and behaviors on individuals (Rupp & Mallory, 2015). One of the most representative of those attitudes corresponds to the employee's OID, which, from the theoretical point of view, is considered a robust concept directly derived from the employees' affective commitment scholarship (Mael & Ashforth, 1992). OID is then understood as "the perception of oneness with or (belonging) to an organization" (Jones & Volpe, 2011, p. 416). Thus, employee's OID embodies a notion at the individual level that emerged from the field of organizational behavior and can also be expressed as a specific form of social identification where an employee's identity is derived from his/her classification into social categories, or social groups (Mael & Ashforth, 1992).
In this sense, it has been widely demonstrated that the perception that employees have on the CSR performed by the organization to which they belong influences their sense of OID (Jones & Rupp, 2017). Studies such as the ones presented in table 1 are just a few examples of the relationship mentioned above. Through their works, these authors elucidate how OID effectively became an outcome of the CSR in several contexts and circumstances. In every case, the role of employees' perceptions has been fundamental for reaching relevant conclusions. Nevertheless, studies so far, have mainly been conceived under quantitative approaches and have been characterized by the use of different methods of operationalizing the concept of CSR at firm level, and the same notion of OID at the individual level (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013; Rupp & Mallory, 2015). Hence, only a few attempts in the qualitative domain are found (e.g., McShane & Cunningham, 2012), which suggest that this approach is yet to be adequately exploited in order to obtain new knowledge in a more focused fashion.
2.2. Instrumental CSR vs. Normative CSR.
One particular sign of the conceptual versatility of the CSR concept is its tendency to be treated as a "body with two sides". Several valid approaches have been suggested to examine its complex nature, from both academic and practical perspectives. Some of the most relevant examples are: a) the complementarity between the internal and the external perception of CSR (Brammer, Millington, & Rayton, 2007); b) the idea of CSR as both an implicit and explicit notion (Matten & Moon, 2008); c) the embedded versus the peripheral constitution of CSR (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013); d) the tension between symbolic and substantive CSR (Tetrault-Sirsly, 2012); e) the contrast between reactiveness and pro-activeness in the method of implementing CSR (Groza, Pronschinske, & Walker, 2011); and f) the dichotomy between the instrumental and the business vision of this concept (Aguilera et al., 2007; Amaeshi & Adi, 2007; Swanson, 1995). The latter being the approach utilized in the present work.
Precisely, the instrumental/normative debate of the CSR is guided by two different forms of logic (Figure 1). On the one hand, Instrumental CSR attempts to convince companies that acting in a socially responsible way contributes to superior financial performance. The fundamental concept is that social problems can be turned into profitable business opportunities and that business organizations can achieve superior financial returns by being socially responsible (Porter & Kramer, 2011). Normative CSR, in turn, takes a different approach and relies on a moral background, particularly inviting companies to do what is morally or ethically "right" in order to be aligned with sustainable development goals. Most scholars working in this field have been identified with universal and disinterested corporate responsibilities and practices that can be implemented by companies (Scherer& Palazzo, 2007).
In their work, Amaeshi and Adi (2007) state that it is almost compulsory that CSR has had "to be reconstructed in an instrumental linguistic praxis to be meaningful to managers in their day-to-day pursuits of organizational...
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