Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not practiced in an institutional vacuum. How are business-centric Anglo-American models of CSR translated and modified in North European institutional and political environments? A recent study published in the Journal of Management Studies highlights that, in Nordic welfare states, the debate about CSR entails a political and institutional struggle over appropriate roles and responsibilities of business in systems of social solidarity. By examining a public debate on corporate tax avoidance as a CSR issue, the study shows how contending actors—tax-avoiding companies and the media—creatively translate, modify, and reconfigure existing models of CSR—both mandatory-implicit and voluntary-explicit—in ways that allow them to proffer normative understandings of CSR that can function to repair as well as disrupt the institutional arrangements of the Nordic welfare state.

Politics of CSR in Nordic welfare states

Research shows that in Nordic welfare states, both managers and politicians often perceive voluntary, explicitly articulated policies and practices of CSR (explicit CSR) as incompatible with the core values and institutions of Nordic socioeconomic governance. Instead, companies are expected to demonstrate responsibility and contribute to society implicitly (implicit CSR) by complying with the existing institutionalized norms and formal regulations about workers’ rights, trade unions, corporate taxation, and environmental protection, for example. Critics have also argued that when CSR takes an explicit, discretionary form, it may potentially replace democratic market regulation and institutionalized social solidarity, thereby contributing to the erosion of the Nordic welfare state. In this context, the debate about CSR involves a political and institutional struggle: conflict and contestation over normative understandings about the appropriate role of business in society.

In the above-mentioned study, we set out to better understand the communicative aspects of this struggle, focusing on how it played out in public debates over corporate (ir)responsibility in the media. Our particular interest lay in examining how corporate and civil society actors translated and reconfigured normative understandings about business-society relations that underpin implicit and explicit models of CSR. We sought to explore how actors communicatively constructed hybrid forms of CSR—models that integrate elements from both implicit and explicit CSR—that better fit the Nordic model of business-society relations.

Extending the theory on communicative institutionalism, we conceptualized these communicative processes as interactive processes of framing, in and through which variations of CSR are socially constructed and contested in society.

Qualitative case study of public debate on corporate tax avoidance

Our empirical analysis was based on a qualitative case study of an episode of moral upheaval and public debate in which corporate tax avoidance was discussed as a CSR issue in Finnish media. The data comprises 493 media texts published over 12 months period. A regional newspaper started the debate by publishing a set of critical articles that exposed a case of tax avoidance by a formerly Finnish-owned healthcare company, which had been recently acquired by an international private equity firm. The exposé quickly triggered broader critical scrutiny of the tax planning practices of Finnish healthcare companies and expressions of public disapproval in national news media and the online comments sections of the news websites. The case was also briefly covered in the business press, tabloids, and national television.

This debate on tax avoidance represents an interesting empirical case for our study because tax payments have traditionally constituted an important element of implicit CSR in Finland and in the Nordic welfare states more generally. Still today, there is a broad consensus among Finns that paying taxes is important for maintaining the welfare state. Through tax payments, firms have been expected to assume responsibility for contributing to social welfare—by supporting the systems of collective responsibility and social solidarity—that characterize the coordinated market economies of Nordic countries.

Hybridization of CSR unfolds through a dialectical process of framing and counter-framing

Our paper offers a theoretical contribution to society-centric, institutional research on CSR by developing a model of hybridization of CSR as a dialectical process of communicative activity. The model explains the emergence of hybrid models of CSR in terms of gradually evolving issue development and frame changes that are driven by discursive struggles over: 1) moral obligations of business in society, 2) appropriate configuration of legitimacy relationships, and 3) appropriate institutional arrangements for CSR governance. These struggles surface institutional contradictions—incompatible institutional prescriptions and misaligned interests—that induce actors to rearticulate, reamplify, and realign their framings to transcend the contradictions. In contrast to prevailing accounts, which tend to theorize hybridization as resulting from isomorphic, mimetic, and normative pressures, our account explicitly attends to the politics of hybridization.

Importance of civic engagement in the debate on CSR

Our paper highlights the importance of understanding the contested, inherently political nature of the ongoing transformation of the global landscape of CSR. The shift toward corporate-driven, explicit CSR involves a process of institutional struggle over the appropriate roles and responsibilities of business in society. CSR is not only about firms doing well by doing good; it also entails a debate and power struggle over who gets to control corporations, what interests corporations serve, and what the appropriate roles of business in socioeconomic governance are.

The study also underscores the significant role of public discussion and civic engagement in the communicative processes that give rise to and disseminate practices and normative understandings of CSR. Active engagement of stakeholders and open discussions about the politics of CSR are important because actors do not simply conform to CSR-related expectations stemming from their institutional setting; they also actively try to shape the institutional environment to promote models of CSR and corporate governance that serve their interests and political agendas related to business-society relations. Our study shows, for example, how corporate actors strategically develop and deploy disruptive framings of CSR that challenge the existing regulative and normative institutions of the Nordic, social-democratic welfare state that hold them accountable to society, thus effectively questioning the institutional core of socioeconomic governance in coordinated market economies.