ABSTRACT
There is little doubt that corporate social responsibility (CSR) remains a contested concept as evidenced to a large degree by a wide variation in the practices companies undertake across different countries (Lindgreen et al., 2009). It tends to be used interchangeably with other concepts such as corporate citizenship (Carroll, 1998, 2015; Matten and Crane, 2005; Moon et al., 2005), corporate social investment (Fig, 2005), corporate social performance and public responsibility (Preston and Post, 1975; Sethi, 1975; Wood, 1991), sustainability (Elkington, 1997) and business ethics (Joyner and Payne, 2002). Among the many reasons for such a contention is that, as many scholars suggest, CSR interpretation is linked to contextual factors within the countries where it is implemented (Brammer et al., 2012; Freeman and Hasnaoui, 2011; Gjølberg, 2009; Kayuni and Tambulasi, 2012; Matten and Moon, 2008). While there is wide agreement that the conceptualisation of CSR and its associated practices tend to vary across different countries, several scholars have pointed out the existence of a gap between globally accepted practices and local priorities especially in the societies of those developing countries where multinational companies are widely considered to be the drivers of the mainstream CSR agenda (Carroll, 2015; Idemudia, 2007, 2011; Muthuri and Gilbert, 2011; Robertson, 2009). However, there is much we still do not know about how the varied understandings of the concept of CSR by various actors in the developing world help such companies reconcile competing demands in foreign countries (Idemudia, 2007; Jamali, 2010; Kolk and Lenfant, 2010).
