Building the Institutional Infrastructure for Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

This paper focuses descriptively on the emerging institutional infrastructure that has resulted in the evolution of initiatives like the Global Reporting Initiative, the social investment movement, and related efforts to create more corporate responsibility, accountability, and transparency. Positioned predominantly in the practical realm, the paper addresses the evolution of some of the major initiatives around corporate accountability, responsibility, and transparency (what I have elsewhere termed the ART of corporate citizenship or corporate responsibility), the emergence of other types of institutions that both foster greater responsibility and criticize current corporate actions. At one level, the study is a field-mapping project, and should also have some implications for practice, as well as for theory. This paper explores the ways in which these emerging institutional mechanisms attempt to shape corporate responsibility and the ways in which theory about corporate responsibility can be enhanced by understanding these institutions.