Determinants of socially responsible corporate behaviours in the Spanish electricity sector

Purpose - This paper aims to achieve a better understanding about the competitive and institutional pressures that can determine socially responsible corporate behaviours of organisations that operate in an organisational field. Design/methodology/approach - The paper draws on New Institutional Sociology to analyse pressures on Spanish electricity companies to behave in socially responsible ways. Data collection covers the period 1997‐2008 and the data sources were the following: semi‐structured interviews, industrial regulation, documents, websites of organisations and associations, and informal discussions. Findings - Socially responsible corporate behaviours of Spanish electricity companies were due not only to internal decisions based on economic rationality, but also to various institutional (coercive, normative and mimetic) pressures. Research limitations/implications - The study covers a specific organisational field, the Spanish electricity sector. Further research would be necessary in order to analyse other organisational fields and to compare the results. Practical implications - Conditions under which organisations behave in socially responsible ways are contrasted in the case of Spanish electricity companies, for instance, the healthy economic environment, the monitoring of their behaviour and their participation in associations that promote Corporate Social Responsibility. Originality/value - Generally, pressures of the environment on organisations to behave in socially responsible ways have received little attention and the specialised literature has focused on the individual organisation level of analysis. So, a contribution of the paper is to analyse the pressures of the competitive and institutional environment on a specific organisational field so that organisations adopt socially responsible corporate behaviours.