Constructing domains of corporate social responsibility: a politicization of corporations at the expense of a de-politicization of society?

Markus Höllerer, Renate Meyer and Michael Lounsbury focus on annual reports of Austrian publicly listed firms and analyze how corporations theorize their social and societal responsibilities. They describe the pattern that they find on the field level as politicization of corporations at the expense of a de-politicization of society: Firms increasingly engage as ‘citizens’ in social policy while, at the same time, power and responsibility are relocated from the sphere of the neo-corporatist state to rather independently operating units such as private sector firms. The chapter not only addresses important conceptual and comparative issues in neo-institutional analysis, but it also speaks to research communities in macro-sociology, political science, and political economy that have not been at the center of attention of our approach so far.